The Problem
IT is a pity that since our Independence in 1980, we have not paid adequate attention to our education system to enable it to suit our new circumstances.
This is a mistake because education is the foundation of any nation’s development.
The Nziramasanga Report attempted to help revamp the whole system.
But unfortunately the recommendations of the ‘Nziramasanga Commission’ were ignored.
Weaknesses of the current education curriculum
The education curriculum still in operation today dates back to the colonial days.
l The separation of school curriculums by race (European and Coloured on one hand and African on the other hand).
l Total emphasis on theoretical knowledge at the expense of essential life skills like farming, dress-making and carpentry.
l Too much European church influence and denigration of African religious and cultural values.
l Literally no emphasis at all on extramural activities like sports, theatre, music and dance.
l No links with the education systems of the progressive world (e.g. Chinese education).
l A university education system that was too elitist and theoretical and also unnecessarily directly linked to Britain’s Cambridge University.
Irrelevance of colonial education system
When the British introduced grammar school education in the then Division of African Education they did not do the same in their European Education.
This was because they wanted to make only us blacks narrow-minded ‘theoreticians’ who could not create anything new on their own.
And, of course, the result was the ‘nose brigade’ that we still have on our television and radio stations today; where our programme producers enjoy ‘nosing’ rubbish in incorrect English, for that matter. Shame!
This clearly shows that since we attained our Independence we have never even tried to give education its real significance in national development.
This is particularly true with regard to our lower education where we have continued to promote mere academic excellence at the expense of education for living.
Our primary and secondary school curriculum emphasises excellence in academic subjects at the expense of practical ones.
It also emphasises religious education at the expense of our humanist traditional religion.
Examples of wrong emphases in our lower education curriculum are:
(a) Emphasis on the Human Rights programme as propounded by UNESCO at the total exclusion of upenyu mumhuri as promoted by Mai Chisamba in her television programme.
(b) Total lack of emphasis on the study of mother tongues (Ndebele and Shona) and traditional African culture and religion.
(c) History textbooks which literally justify slavery, colonialism and economic sanctions by failing to adequately condemn them.
(d) The abandonment of practical lessons like Agriculture, Carpentry, Cookery and Building…….(or the former F2 system which we abandoned for the wrong reasons).
(e) No lessons on the significance of Pungwe and other traditional practices that need to be polished up and retained for the benefit of future generations.
Higher and Tertiary Education also has its own glaring shortcomings which are exemplified by the following:
(a) A proliferation of universities offering grammar school rather than comprehensive education. (Hence failure by its Water Engineers to drill and equip a single borehole or its educators to write sets of school textbooks.)
(b) The universities sticking to colonial curricula which promote foreign values like academic excellence rather than our own values (e.g. co-operative agriculture) (c) Self destructive elitism (chishefu): No links with lower education or youth organisations at all.
(d) No links at all with chiefs, revolutionaries, n’angas, the film and theatre industry or even Mai Chisamba
Even in areas like sport institutions of tertiary education stay aloof from the school system because they very wrongly considered themselves more ‘varungu’ than ‘vanhu vevanhu’.
Required change in our ideology
The secret of the success of any ideological revolution has always been its systematic dissemination of the correct ideology and making sure that future generations adopt it.
Since we gained our Independence in 1980, of all the government Ministers I have worked with, only Cde Border Gezi dedicated his whole life to ensuring the successful establishment of a realistic new system for our youth.
And this was mostly because he was a leader who always heeded other people’s advice before implementing any new measures.
Another very important issue is that, like other professions, EDUCATION is a profession and should be led only by professional revolutionaries and never by racists like David Coltart.
Education should also be the channel of a nation’s ideology.
In China, for example, children learn to recite the “Thoughts of Mao” as early as pre-school, and every youth becomes a member of the All China Youth Federation between the ages of 15 and 35.
As a result, unemployment is virtually unknown in that country because youths easily engage in self employment.
Need for new curriculum
The Nziramasanga Commission recommended some very progressive measures which, with some modifications, would have changed our education system from the colonialist grammar school (elitist, but too theoretical) system to a comprehensive and, therefore, progressive one.
Among other things, the Commission recommended that our Secondary School education be revised to include practical subjects like gardening and carpentry and also that African languages and cultural values be promoted rather than foreign ones.
Due to the existence of cumbersome constitutional provisions in the education curriculum, what we need to go into now is the revision of the syllabuses of sensitive subjects to make them suit the changing times.
For example, now that our national developmental policy now targets: Indigenisation, Empowerment, Development and Employment, these values must be adequately included in school textbooks from January next year.