By Dr Ireen Mahamba

THE emptying out of the African soul was a pre-requisite for an equally devastating approach to teaching and learning by the British; the inculcation of robot mentality.
To create robots out of the African people followed the hierarchical structure of the colonial system with the white man at the top, and the Africans below him.
In schools the pupils were relegated to rote learning, memorising and regurgitating what was ‘learned’.
They were denied higher order thinking skills, such as critical thinking, analysis, synthesis, application.
So the mind was filled with information that was not processed to any meaningful degree.
Paulo Freire, the veteran Brazilian liberation educationist called it the banking method of education.
In this method, the teacher banks the knowledge in the pupils and come exam time, he unbanks the information, the learners are rewarded for accurately remembering what they are told.
They are not rewarded for thinking, for analysing, for being creative, innovative, imaginative or expressing feelings.
Once they master the art of repeating what they are told, they are ‘learned’.
The result is those who know give the command and those who don’t know obey the commands.
Thomas Gradgrind’s classroom, in Charle’s Dickens’s Hard Times, is a magnificent satire on the factory model of education born of capitalism’s necessity to reduce each person into raw material to be moulded for its purposes.
Sissy Jupe, a pupil whose father was a star of the circus with his dog Merry Legs, is a typical example of a mind that would not be reduced to function at the level of facts as the other pupils had become expert at. A new comer to the school system, she constantly made the mistake of thinking, dreaming, imagining, supposing while the teacher repeatedly reminded her that what was wanted were ‘facts and facts only.’
The kind of answer required in this type of classroom is epitomised in her classmate’s response when asked to define a horse: ‘Quadruped, gramnivorous, 44 teeth … sheds coat in winter…’ and so on, facts and facts only.
The purpose of insisting on facts was to eliminate the awakening of thoughts to create robots, because a robot only reproduces what it has been programmed to ‘remember’.
We confronted the robot mentality during the liberation struggle.
That was the line in the schools in Mozambique, no robots.
Instead of robotism, “our educational programmers are primarily designed to develop the creative genius inherent in our people”. (Mutumbuka: 1978).
So instead of ‘facts and facts only’, initiative, self reliance, innovation were encouraged in the learners.
In those schools, there was a symbiotic relationship between the teachers and the learners, a reciprocal relationship in which the teacher both teaches and learns from the pupils and vice versa.
The dialogical approach allowed the teacher and pupils to have a collegial relationship, it allowed the pupils to dialogue with the teacher and among themselves, so that there was mutual benefit and growth.
This effectively destroyed authoritarianism, and passivity which were the main tools in creating robot mentality, the pupils had responsibility for their learning.
The dialogical approach also neutralised the individualistic approach to teaching and learning that pitted pupils against each other for personal ascendancy.
The collective ethos born of the experience of struggling together for the benefit of all of Zimbabwe was incompatible with the selfish struggle for personal aggrandisement.
Learning was meant to benefit all just as the struggle was meant to benefit all.
Teaching and learning methodology therefore employed ‘group work, group cooperation, group decision making, criticism, and self criticism’ (Pamberi neEducation:10).
Without departing from colonial methodology, we cannot fulfill the goal of transforming Zimbabwe for the benefit of all its people.
Today we are struggling to get our youths out of the thinking mode that they need to be employed by someone or some company.
Part of this has to do with the inherited structures that required that Africans be employees of the whites, but it is also because we have not broken away from the colonial teaching methodology that supported these structures.
It is not easy for the young ones to break out of this to be employed by someone mode if we continue to teach them in ways that make them passive recipients of information which makes them lose confidence in themselves.
In educating our young we are preparing them to shoulder very grave responsibilities.
We are preparing them to be custodians of vast resources, that is; the people of Zimbabwe who are its greatest resource, immense mineral resources, agricultural resources, and the infrastructure to support all this.
We are preparing to hand over to them all who we are and all we own. For them to discharge this responsibility successfully, they have to be taught to be masters of their own destiny.
The challenge is ours Zimbabwe, we have a great land, we have to invest all of ourselves if we are to make it.

Dr Mahamba is a war veteran and holds a PhD from Havard University. She is currently doing consultancy work.