Editor, Refer to the letter, “Too early to judge products from TVET system” (The New Times, July 14). The author of the original article, Sam Kebongo, only said “relook and hopefully readjust the TVET approach”. He also warns us not to borrow formulae just because it’s working well elsewhere. Indeed, we must “now tweak and adapt TVET to our situation so that it can work for us”. Mr. Kebongo is right on spot. We need to seriously reconsider our entire education system. In Rwandan society, do we valorise manual work enough? Our homework should start with devising answers to these following fundamental questions: do we feel the need, as a society, and do we have the will to reverse the trend, to elaborate practical work based school curricula? How would all Rwandan pupils — girls and boys alike — learn at school, beginning from kindergartens, how to cook their own daily meals, how to wash their school uniforms, how to sweep their home compounds? How to impart in everyone of our kids some basic technical abilities so that they grow up as practical individuals, constantly assessing the surrounding material world, either locally made or imported, either direct through their hands or/and indirectly through their heads? The list is long… Ultimately, TVET would be those institutions where individual work abilities are refined as needed. And not merely centres dispensing alien skills, supposedly needed by the industry, and yet they may not necessarily be needed by individual workers or society at large. Francois-Xavier Nziyonsenga
