LAST week I had the privilege of being invited to preside over the graduation of an Early Childhood Development (ECD) class at Chiwashira Primary School in north-west Chikomba District.
It is a fairly new school which was introduced after 2000 to cater for children of resettled A1 and A2 farmers.
At the graduation ceremony I was struck by several things which have prompted me to share these experiences with you since I consider them of far-reaching consequences for national priorities in the sphere of education.
To begin with, when I set out to Chiwashira Primary School, I was hoping that I would see a highly developed school, but what I saw on arrival prompted me to gasp.
Here is a school which was started on tobacco barns premises with a few additional extensions to accommodate the growing number of education seekers.
The picture below summarises the physical infrastructures that host an ECD class and streams of Grades One to Seven as well as secondary school students whose classrooms are still under construction a few metres from the primary school.
Yet in spite of the limited physical infrastructure, this place is bustling with life, with energy and with zeal.
The teachers, the ECD graduands, the primary school students and their secondary counterparts, not to mention the supportive parents, were all exuding life, health and joy.
It is from these that I wish to draw several lessons that I feel Zimbabweans should emulate.
When I arrived the place was already abuzz with activity.
The community had come in full force to support their teachers and their children.
Coincidentally the parents and teachers alike had just been airing their views to the team of curriculum reviewers from the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education who had arrived earlier.
So strong had been their stand on the importance of foregrounding any educational activity within the African value system.
When I later stood up to present my own words of appreciation as the guest of honour, I was struck by their wangauripo remarks (you were there when we said it).
When I focused on the centrality of Unhu/Ubuntu as the informing philosophy to anchor any curriculum for Zimbabweans, they chorused that that is exactly what they had said earlier in their contribution to the current curriculum review debate.
Such striking likeness of minds struck me to empathy.
Here was a display of a high level of consciousness one would not expect to see in a place as remote as Chiwashira.
It jolted me into realising that Chiwashira was not remote after all, just as there is no remote place in Zimbabwe.
We are the once who are remote; removed and alienated from these in fact homelier surroundings, all because of the colonial education which created exotic minds in us.
I was humbled and I felt truly at home with my roots after a very long time of intellectual wandering indeed.
I learnt that any education which did not respond to the needs of the community was in fact not education if not mis-education.
This humbling experience taught me that appropriate education must of necessity be an extension of the family life and values.
The central message I got from interacting with these luminaries was: family, community, school (primary and secondary), college and university must be connected by one thread feeding back into the community.
This understanding is shared by the Chinese concept of ‘universitisation’ which means taking the university to the community.
The community is what gives all these institutions relevance.
They all work in the service of the community.
As Achebe puts it the African scholar must be painfully sensitive of his identity which of necessity must be derived from the African sensibility, the African worldview, which in fact should be the subject of history.
The African learner must be a person who has some kind of conception of the society in which he is living and the way he wants the society to go.
This is what the new curriculum must focus on.
In a sense Achebe stresses that the articulation of the African philosophy involves certain imperatives, chief among them, sharing the internal sensibility of that worldview; and to do so one has to belong to the whole tradition of the people ‘in spirit and in truth’.
The Chiwashira community bemoaned an education that alienated their children from their traditions, from their cultural values and from their geographical and historical locale.
They deplored the ‘rights approach’ to education which alienated their children from their parents and also led to abdication of responsibilities.
They deplored gendering education in a manner that sowed seeds of division, succeeding not in creating gender equality, but in fact fostering discrimination of sexes.
They spoke passionately about complementarity of roles and sharing privileges, successes and failures in line with the tenets of unhu/ubuntu.
The point I wish to stress in this article is that early childhood education is key to the curriculum review process.
They say in English charity begins at home.
These formative years are critical in shaping character, personality, attitudes and behaviours.
It is at this point that the young can be taught respect of their traditions, the values of sharing, the love of their country, dedication to duty and an undying commitment to Zimbabwe.
All the subjects in the new curriculum must bear this mark of patriotism and indeed of undivided nationalism.
Contextualisation is key.
And Zimbabwe is the bedrock of that process.
Creativity too must be encouraged.
We want a curriculum that creates innovators and creators, not perennial mimics.
Education must empower and to do so it must create employers and employees alike.
Long live Chiwashira and many such institutions across the country.
Humble beginnings often have lofty endings.
May the world contribute to its grand vision.