HomeOld_PostsCurriculum review as part of a shared national vision: Part Three

Curriculum review as part of a shared national vision: Part Three

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THE outcome of discussions in part one and two are as follows:
a) The current education curriculum is producing generations deeply alienated from their roots, people who look down upon themselves and their folk, people would wish to belong to a Western world which, ironically, is not prepared to accept so-called people of colour, more so when they happen to be black!

b) The Zimbabwean curriculum, like those of other parts of Africa, has remained colonial in outlook, dutifully reproducing elites who suffer from an almost incurable malady of inferiority complex; it is an elite which remains imitative, a caricature of whites at best, and therefore unoriginal and hardly creative in ways which promote African interests!
Why?
Because the colonial architects of such curricula in Africa had clear objectives most of which were meant to promote at the ideological level, imperial interests at all costs.
This raw fact partly explains why most African leaders and their followers find it difficult to proceed on any programme of national development without the support or indeed approval of their erstwhile colonial masters.
The result is predictable: we continue to move in circles, going nowhere, development-wise.
Worse, those who dream original dreams, those who wish to follow African centred programmes of development are regarded as eccentrics, fit candidates for Western sponsored regime change programmes.
In light of observations mentioned above the question that arises is: what is to be done?
One can argue that much as Zimbabwe has done well in establishing educational infrastructure all over the country, it still has a long way to go in the area of generating educational ‘software’, that is, the actual content at the heart of the whole education system itself!
At present that heart is defined by ‘Batman’, ‘Superman’, ‘Ben 10’, ‘Flintstones’, ‘Rupert’, ‘Fresh Prince of Bel Air’ all alien stuff unsuited for children in our African environment.
One way to simplify what at first might appear unnecessarily complex is to ask: what are the key values that should constitute the core and or heart of the whole education system in Zimbabwe?
Which key subjects or areas of study are likely to deliver these values so that at a very early age our children already feel and look at the world like Zimbabweans?
In other words our education system should attempt to define us as a people by making sure that we share right across the whole length and breadth of the country those core values that go on to make us who we are!
Let us say some of these core values revolve around respect for life, respect and love for each other, pride and consciousness about what our history has made of us, commitment to our country and its well being or in short unhu/ubuntu, the next logical thing to do is to work out a syllabus which begins to deliver these values at an early age of our lives.
Personally I would not hesitate to introduce pupils to orature, especially to those wonderful stories about tsuro na gudo, the hair and the tortoise, those animal stories for which Africa is well known, those very stories which in their own inimitable manner constitute what is timeless and classical, that which summarises African wisdom and worldview and survival values across generations.
But for this to work a whole creative enterprise involving the migration of these stories from oral forms and print into electronic visual formats would be critical!
By inculcating a set of core values at an early age, it means that whatever subjects and or disciplines are taught later, be they geography, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, medicine etc we will be able to study all these, but from an African point of view.
Put differently, this point of view becomes the common thread which binds all of us together, as Zimbabweans, regardless of whatever discipline we get into. The core values become part of the national identity, part of the cement which holds us together.
Such aspects of a national identity do not happen on their own, just like that, as the current curriculum seems to assume.
Someone has to design the necessary software, someone has to come up with the requisite structure and or architecture to house the software in which is embedded a national vision before the necessary pedagogy is implemented.
This is what the British, the Americans, the French, the Germans etc have done in a systematic and thorough manner using their education systems to best advantage.
Just to demonstrate the importance of core values in any education system, here is what David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, said in June 2014 about the need to mainstream Britishness before his then minister of education, Michael Gove, started preaching the same sermon to British schools:
It is time to stop being squeamish about Britishness and tell everyone who lives here that refusing to accept British laws and the British way of life is not an option—our values and the respect for the history that helped deliver them and the institutions that uphold them form the bedrock of Britishness.
We should not be squeamish about our achievements, or bashful about our Britishness.
In fact Cameron has gone further and promised to reassert British values as part of a Magna Carta for Modern Britain and has insisted that that Magna Carta becomes a key part of the school curriculum.
In our Zimbabwean context, we took such strategic national issues for granted and assumed that people born in a geographical space called Zimbabwe would turn out automatically as Zimbabweans. But that descriptive term, Zimbabwe, is something that needs a lot of inputs from our culture and history if it is to become a country and a nation with a distinct identity, with sufficient depth and breadth befitting a proud and dignified people!
A national identity is not something that happens on its own; we have to go out of our way to author it, to construct it and to promote it before we can begin to enjoy a sense of national cohesion, notwithstanding all our diverse characteristics as population groups!
Accordingly, it is obvious that reviewing the current curriculum is not just one of those things which need to be done in the course of duty.
Reviewing a curriculum is akin to redesigning the future of a country, it is akin to giving birth to a brand new generation and should be done with all the seriousness that is required for such an undertaking.
In fact one can argue that we need some aspects of the kind of courage which was needed to fight the liberation struggle and to take back our land from British thieves in order to succeed in transforming our current curriculum from being a colonial one into being a liberating one in line with our liberation history.

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