Vocational schools, getting children out of streets

Vocational education, also called career and technical education is meant to prepare students for manual and practical activities. These are traditionally non-academic and totally related to a specific trade. It is called technical education as a learner directly develops expertise in a particular group of techniques. In the eastern region however, there few vocational schools due to many reasons among which is the financial one. Some of these technical schools include Nsinda vocational school, Kayonza carpentry school, etc. Nsinda Vocational school for instance, aims at teaching procedural knowledge. This is contrasted with declarative knowledge as used in education in a usually broader scientific field, which might necessarily concentrate on theory and abstract conceptual knowledge. A school as an institution is meant to shape up an individual in many ways; different schools are meant to serve different purposes. There are two types of schools namely; academic and vocational schools. Well, each institution is meant to serve its own purposes. Vocational schools providing vocational education are schools in which students are taught the skills needed to perform a particular job. They are meant to actually give the youth chance to create their own jobs, unlike academic schools which are meant to produce job seekers, needless to mention the scarcity of white collar jobs on the market. Whereas academic schools provide enough or rather relevant knowledge to students, vocational schools have a big role to play. They impart skills needed for an individual to survive in life, thus creating jobs since they are more practical than theoretical. “Our aim is to help those young boys and girls to gain life skills, which will help them in future. When a child drops out of a secondary or primary school, it does mean that life ends there. So ours is to get them out of street and make them responsible citizens,” remarks Mutabigwa Joseph, the legal representative of Nsinda vocational school, based in Nsinda, Rwamagana district. Vocational schools are more relevant to life in society since they prepare an individual fully, as one learns from the job right away. Thus it doesn’t require one to go all the streets looking for the jobs that are already created. Unlike other academic schools, vocational schools help students to continue with life at its best, even when all has failed. You find students struggling to get papers and after university, there are no jobs. “I wish I had done joined technical school- I would now be able to start up my own workshop,” laments Richard Muhimbura, a jobless university graduate. It is also a type of education where even the ignorant gets a chance of acquiring knowledge for them, which isn’t the case for academic schools. Vocational studies render a chance of exploitation of the natural resources in the country. Minerals such as sand, clay are such good minerals that would not be exploited without the use of such vocational studies, hence the use of vocational schools. Therefore, as the labour market becomes more specialized and economies demand higher levels of skills, the government needs to invest more in technical education in order to meet the existing demand. shebs10@yahoo.fr