ON April 18 1980, the Rhodesian education system was supposed to become nothing more than a modest maid.
We have witnessed a frightened attempt to change the sector through the Nziramasanga Report.
Yet the growing chorus for a shift, drastic changes to the education sector cannot be ignored anymore.
In transforming the education sector in the country there are several historical factors to take into consideration for the Government.
The colonial regime established a structure of discrimination of blacks in the sector in order to sideline them from acquiring the basic right of education.
The colonial regime, through their colonial policy sidelined the black majority with only 12 percent of the 100 000 blacks who completed seven years of primary education proceeding to secondary education every year.
Secondly, the colonial regime came up with a restrictive law, the Native Education Department and the Education Act of 1979 which made sure that blacks received inferior education in the form a watered- down curriculum.
This is a challenge that we have been grappling to address since 1980 because our curriculum still gives priority to Western history and world outlook over ours.
Yet during the colonial era, the colonial government systemically left education in the hands of Christian missions, and second, the educational system that was offered was not technically or vocationally oriented.
“The colonial educational system has been criticised for being too literary and too classical to be useful,” reads part of a report titled ‘Zimbabwe-Constitutional Legal Foundations’.
The essence of black education was to ensure that they did not compete with whites for high- profile jobs so that they remained servile to whites.
Domboshava Training Centre and Tsholotsho which opened in 1920 and 1921 respectively gave education confined to agriculture, carpentry and building so that blacks could not have a stake in their economy.
To date, little has been done to restructure and transform the education sector with the closest the country got being the pledge by ZANU in 1980 to establish an education sector that told the Zimbabwe story.
In its 1980 Election Manifesto, ZANU PF highlighted education not only as a priority for every Zimbabwean but as the engine that would drive Zimbabwe’s economic prospects for the better.
It pledged:
1. The abolition of racial education and utilisation of the educational system to develop in the young generation a non-racial attitude, a common identity and common loyalty.
2. The establishment of free and compulsory primary and secondary education for all children regardless of race.
3. The abolition of sex discrimination in the education system.
4. The orientation of the educational system to national (interest).”
The infamous Education Act which made it virtually impossible for blacks to acquire education was one such discriminatory law that segregated blacks and violated their rights to acquire and access quality education.
It created a system that operated in such a way as to keep Africans in a position of permanent disadvantage so that they could not have the power and skills to control their economy.
During that time education was compulsory for white children and the fees was relatively low, while it wasn’t enforced on Africans whose parents found the fees prohibitive but it was in reality taken from them as a basic human right by whites.
In 1976, over half of Zimbabwe’s black population, at that time estimated to be around 7 million people were under the age of 15, yet only 846 260 of them were in primary school.
According to the Monthly Digest of Statistics, more than half of all black children admitted to school dropped out before completing their primary education, and only a tiny fraction, around 0- 5 percent reached the Sixth Form.
This was as a result of the racist settler regime well calculated and crafted policy of systematically sidelining blacks from acquiring education through a watered down and Anti-African curriculum, hostile policies, prohibitive fees and discriminatory laws such as the Education Act.
The evolution of the country’s education system began in 1980 with the provision of free primary school education for all children in Zimbabwe.
But this policy was not supported by the adoption of a curriculum that pursues the national interest and the liberation agenda.
The Government has no option but to transform the education sector if it does not want to continue to lose generation after generation.