It’s time to revamp our education system (Part 2)

If you give a man a fish, he will eat, once. If you teach a man to fish, he will eat for the rest of his life. If you are thinking a year ahead, sow seed. If you are thinking ten years ahead, plant a tree. If you are thinking a hundred years ahead, educate the people. By planting a tree, you will harvest tenfold. By educating the people, you will harvest one hundredfold. Kuan-tsu The above quotation is spot on only that it would have added that when you are educating people give them education that is relevant to their development needs. Or more precisely there is no one size fits all kind of education. It is our failure to recognise this deficiency that there has been a continuous mismatch between educational outputs and educational outcomes in Africa. In the opinion of one observer, headcount alone is not enough. What is in the heads - the educational outcomes - must be evaluated, especially with respect to individual competence and effectiveness in the workplace and also in terms of equality of opportunity (Husén,1979). The true purpose of education should be to convey to individuals the collective knowledge and experience of the past and present so as to enable them to become more productive and effective members of society. Accordingly, Julius Nyerere (1974) observed that the purpose of education should be to transmit knowledge and wisdom from one generation to the next. Nyerere points out that education’s main purpose should be to liberate man, both physically and mentally. He distinguishes between a system of education which turns men and women into tools and one which makes them liberated and skilled users of tools. In contrast to the true purpose of education as expressed above our education today is characterised by inculcating egocentric and materialistic values at the cost of collective effort and responsibility; for adopting irrelevant and rigid curricula; for embracing antiquated teaching and learning techniques; for producing docile and dependent-minded graduates; and for widening the gap between the rich and poor. These vices of our curriculum today contrast very much with inherent African indigenous knowledge or the form of inherent African education values. “…traditional African education prepared the young members of a community for specific responsibilities they were going to shoulder in maturity. It was education for life with all its complexities, aimed at satisfying personal needs, promoting the growth of talents and serving the community in which the recipient of the education lived. This way the culture of one generation was transmitted to the succeeding generation (Ado Tiberondwa, 1998). The biggest undoing of our education system today is complete neglect of what is African and qualifying everything African as primitive and irrelevant. In contrast to the kind of African education, the western education was made to measure for the individualistic culture, the environmental realities and the extreme weather conditions of the west. The educational system should be revamped and re-designed by African consultants (donor conditions notwithstanding) who understand the nature of the issues at stake. A practical combination of African values should be merged with international standards, in order for the continent not to lose out in this era of extreme globalization.What we need today is kind of hybrid curriculum that infuses core indigenous African knowledge into the mainstream learning and teaching process. The curriculum whose evaluation method is not based on how well a child speaks English or French as the case may be, but the kind of curriculum that promotes talents like music dance and drama, the kind of education that preserves and validates African cultures and values. Today we need curriculum that will promote learners’ creativity and enhances critical thinking! In short, the kind of curriculum that will address African problems and preserve African mores and heritage for posterity. For example, up to this day I have never known why or how much I gained by learning about the Canadian prairies and the use of combined harvesters in Canada. I don’t know or see the relevance of studying about the tree logging in British Colombia-when and where will a child apply such knowledge in a country like Rwanda which is very hilly?It is widely felt and evident that our current education system is bent on producing academic robots or to use Léopold Senghor’s famous terminology, ‘photographic negatives’ - of the British, French, Portuguese and Belgian colonial masters. Many of the educational strategies initiated by most African countries over the past thirty or forty years have not had meaningful transformational effects to the continent especially due to the maladjustment between African and western realities. We are convinced and hope against hope that education and development are strongly correlated. However, the successful synthesis of the two will depend on our ability to resolve effectively the above-mentioned predicaments. Education serves its intended purpose only if it’s a product of the immediate environment. There is an immediate need to re-design our curricula to suit our development goals and not to be validated by western culture and educational system. There must be deliberate R&D policies to merge original and authentic African indigenous knowledge in natural and social sciences to foster development at home. Until then, the struggle for total Africa liberation still continues….The author is an educationist, author and a publisher.