YOU do not create scientists by rote learning. 

Teaching children to memorise is the surest way of killing their intellectual capacities. 

You create scientists by allowing children to think through how to make things, constructing various items, translating the image/s in their minds into physical material things. 

He/she envisages a machine, a car, and creates it, as in the case of our own Maxwell Sangulani Chikumbutso, it comes into being and they name it, whatever name they choose for their own creation.

You do not get to this level by memorising words, letters, counting one to zillion and for Chikumbutso perhaps the saving grace is that he did not go beyond Form Two.

When a child sees something, touches it, feels it and observes it, they feel good and truly they can say that they know it and will seek further to understand it by observing it more, by doing various things with it.

Grow some beautiful flowers at the school and let the children assist by watering the flowers, pulling out weeds and through this real interaction with roses, marigolds, rosemary, lavender, whatever the nature of the flowers, they will know the flowers , their names, colours, even if they do not draw or colour them, a lot of learning is going on, a lot of thinking is happening in their minds and creativity is stimulated, not by seeing a rose or a cow in a book and colouring it. 

The colouring, drawing and painting is subsidiary, only a way of capturing what they have actually experienced. 

Colouring and painting cannot be the beginning and ending of their learning, it would be to deprive the children too harshly.

Milk comes from a cow, you can tell them that, and you can make them draw the cow with udders bursting with milk, but where is the experience of seeing and touching a live cow, of seeing it being milked, trying their hand at milking and drinking the warm frothy milk straight from the cow’s udders, there is ecstasy in this, not in repeating loudly from a chart, COW, DOG, CAT… and when they have repeated this, so what, what have they learned, what has happened to their intellectual potencies? 

Those children in the rural areas have each thing they need to develop all their nine intelligences within their reach, but we still confine them to the classroom when the cow moos outside the classroom window. 

We ask them to repeat the sound of the cow mooing but it is right there before their eyes… what are we doing? 

Why are we not letting them ensconce with nature? 

We have this strange notion that to be learned is to be removed from reality, to be locked up behind four walls, in this manner you might turn out book professors maybe, but never engineers or scientists.

Fish … fishing, makwaya, mhatye, muramba, these are found in local rivers and of all things children love outings, this can be combined with a picnic to go and fish and to watch adults fishing. 

Nothing beats the experience of watching a fish get caught and landed and for them to try this and then name the fish they have caught… drawing and painting the fish is just the icing, it is not the experience, it is not the learning. 

And for them to take one or two of the fish home for supper is special. 

A fish pond at school would also be ideal, and the children can assist in various ways, feeding the fish and it is a wondrous experience for them to watch fish of all sizes come up to pick the feed, the children feel joyous. 

There is a lot of learning, so much thinking, cogitating, so much imagination. 

So much more goes on in the child’s mind than going through a chart on the wall reading ‘A’ for Apple and so on. 

That is not learning, it is simply reminding the child’s linguistic intelligence how the words it already knows are formed, but that is not the task of ECD learning, it is too early, the ECD’s are not ready for it though you can cost them to go through with what might seem like success. In fact, so much else goes wrong, it is totally unnecessary and an impediment to their growth and development.

Have you ever wondered why children in cities who are caged for three years before Grade One have problems with language development and yet those in rural areas who are free are generally literate in the first three months of Grade One? 

Their city counterparts struggle with literacy sometimes for life and yet it is something so basic any child should master easily unless they are mentally challenged in some way. 

Each child is born linguistically intelligent. They have that intelligence naturally. Where things go wrong is the way we approach teaching language, we force a foreign language on them in infancy stunting the development of the mother language, and ultimately foist the second language on the mother language whose development is already compromised. 

How can it be normal for a child to learn without ever touching or feeling anything?  

But we have customised this approach and it seems the norm but it is the most unintellectual approach to teaching and learning. 

A child cannot be at peace by just looking at a cow, but it feels natural if it touches and feels the cow, and talks to it. 

This way a bond is created, and they learn to love the cow, and the naturalist in them is spurred on. 

Drawing the bird’s nest is not learning, take them out, let them see the birds nesting, let them watch them over time until the hatchlings are ‘born’ and watch the mothers feed the young, nothing beats that experience. 

It is better than any book, any drawing or colouring.

The world outside is the most logical and normal classroom, not the four walls. 

In the real world the children can learn all they need to know and would only come to the classroom to analyse and record the ‘data’ they have collected, what they have learned from the world outside the world, but we have customised the opposite robbing our children of what would truly open their intellectual capacities and unleash the great potential in them.

Children are born scientific, but we cripple the scientist in them.