THE plethora of challenges currently bedeviling the education sector in the country are as a result of the strict divisions on the basis of race that the sector was subjected to during the dark era of colonialism.
At independence in 1980, Zimbabwe inherited an education system that favoured the white race.
Prior to 1980, very few black children had access to education.
The few blacks who had access to education found themselves in schools that were poorly funded, with very few educational resources and a separate curriculum from that offered in all-white schools (categorised as Group ‘A’ schools) .
Education for black students was provided mainly by missionaries rather than by the government.
Basically, two school systems existed prior to independence.
As demand for more education among Africans increased, the colonial government stepped in to control the provision of education and ensure that missionaries would not ‘overeducate’ them.
The amount voted for the education of European, Asian and Coloureds in the Federation for the year 1960-61 was
£9 733 561.
The number of pupils was 71 633, of whom 61 690 were Europeans. This meant an expenditure of about £136 a head on each pupil.
By way of contrast, in the same year the expenditure of the Southern Rhodesian Government on African education was £3 953 000.
This works out at rather less than £8 on each pupil.
The aid given by the Federal Government to Catholic and other private schools amounts to only £10 a year for every primary pupil and £20 for every secondary one.
The colonial administrators were critical of the type of education that the missionaries provided Africans.
They felt the bulk of Africans had to be given education which was practical in nature; related to agriculture and industry to prepare them as labourers.
The few blacks who were allowed to further their education would only do so to service the establishment as lowly clerks, interpreters and teachers, among other jobs.
The problems still persist up to this day.
In transforming the education sector in the country, there are several historical factors to take into consideration for the Government.
First is that the colonial regime established a structure of discrimination of blacks in the sector in order to sideline blacks from acquiring the basic right to education.
The colonial regime, through their colonial policy, flagrantly 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 blacks received inferior education in the form a watered-down curriculum.
During the colonial era, this problem was not only manifesting itself in the curriculum, but on the shortage of schools and divisions on racial lines of the education the racist settler-regime was offering.
In order to maintain the racist education it was offering to blacks, the colonial government systemically left education essentially in the hands of missionaries.
It was all about perpetuating white domination over blacks.
These two characteristics contributed to the present social, economic and political problems in the country since it inherited the same bottleneck education system that was used by colonialists.
As a result, the country has been producing ‘little British people’ as graduates.
“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’.
“In 1978 the Ministry of Education and Culture combined its former divisions of European, African, Coloured, and Asian education into one structure and endorsed that structure in the Education Act of 1979, thus establishing a non-racial educational policy a year before independence.”
The essence of black education was to ensure that they did not compete with whites for high-profile jobs; they had to remain servile to whites.
The perpetuation of this hostile and anti-black curriculum was manifest at Domboshava Training Centre and Tsholotsho which opened in 1920 and 1921 respectively.
These two institutions gave education confined to agriculture, carpentry and building so that blacks could not have a stake in their economy.
Sadly, 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 establishing an education sector that told the Zimbabwean story.
In 1976, over half of Zimbabwe’s black population, at that time estimated to be around seven 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.
The evolution of the country’s education system began under the leadership of President Robert Mugabe in September 1980 with the provision of free primary school education for all children in Zimbabwe.
But this policy did support the adoption of a curriculum that pursues the national interest.
If anything, the highest literacy rate in Africa that we boast of is an extension of white hegemony and dominance over black people.
The Government has no option but to transform the education sector if it does not want to lose yet another generation.
The journey begins with the complete overhaul of the current curriculum.