Last week in The Herald, the Minister of Primary and Secondary Education, Dr Lazarus Dokora, talked about the need for co-operation between his Ministry and that of Higher and Tertiary Education in order for the proposed curriculum changes to go through.
He could not have been more correct, for obvious reasons.
But what needs to be done is more than in-servicing lecturers and teachers on the new changes so that they can be effective vehicles of the new curriculum.
What is necessary is an overhaul of the teacher-training sector. It is critical to lay a new ideological foundation for teacher-training so that the understanding they need to cultivate in the children, first becomes a part of their psyche, their world view.
They have to be won over to become patriotic before they can teach learners to be patriotic. They have to know, understand and believe that our liberation struggle is the greatest thing that ever happened to our country since the establishment of the Great Zimbabwe State before they can teach our learners to be in love with our liberation struggle.
They have to know and understand our history from our own perspective before they can teach our children to be proud of who they are, Zimbabweans, Africans. They themselves have to be truly Zimbabwean before they can nurture our children to be proudly Zimbabwean, to come into their own as heirs to Zimbabwe.
The teachers have to understand that they are heirs to Zimbabwe and their fundamental mission is to pass the mantle on to our children so they can never fail to take their place as builders of our Great Zimbabwe.
When these cardinals are in place, our teachers would be in a position to undo the colonial legacy that has dogged our education system since the early 1990s.
Our teachers have to understand the importance of education with production, why it is critical in turning our economy around, but more than that, they need to practise education-with-production in their teacher training. This way they will be able to teach our children the education with production way.
The director of the Zimbabwe Foundation for Education, (ZIMFEP) Comrade E. Chitofu has many times said (as I have reported in earlier articles), that each school should be allocated some land where they can practise education-with- production but the place where this should really start is the teachers’ colleges.
They should be allocated some land, they should be self-sufficient in the production of most of their material needs, they should be given grants to purchase machinery for various production processes.
They need to produce goods and services that society can benefit from, communities in which teachers’ training colleges are based. Each has to experience a raise in their standard of living due to the existence of the college in their midst.
When the Zimbabwe Integrated Teacher Education Course(ZINTEC) was introduced soon after independence, it had community services as an important component and credits from this were part and parcel of the assessment of the student teacher. The purpose of this was to link teacher-trainees to real life, to orient them to the fact their work was interwoven with the community and involved community service. It should still apply in this day.
If our teacher-trainees serve the community as part of their education, they will be able to teach our young to identify with the community and to serve it as part of their education.
They would aspire to serve it and the nation even after school. This would break the fallacial and erroneous view that schools are elitist citadels superior to the people, a notion that is ridiculous given that the school and the children come from and are sustained by that community. Education with production in schools essentially involves serving the community.
The way teachers are trained is the way they should teach. If they are taught to parrot what so and so said, they will teach the same way. If they are taught to memorise in order to pass exams, they will coach the children the same. If they are taught theoretically, it will be their inclination to teach the same way, in other words their understanding of what education is all about is the same understanding they will school the children in.
Innovation, creativity, originality,independence, analysis and synthesis are some of the key characteristics that should be engendered in our teachers. Taught this way, our teachers will cultivate the same in our children.
At the end of the day it is important not only to synchronise teacher-training with the new curriculum but even more fundamentally with where the nation is going. Teacher-training should interpret the nation’s goals and tailor its activities to fulfill these so that even in cases where primary and secondary education is lagging behind, teachers can show the way; after all they are the key instruments of production in transforming society through education.
Theirs is a critical mission because all the heirs to Zimbabwe, in whose hands the future of this great land lies, are fashioned by their hands.