HomeOld_PostsHow to teach our Children to be heirs of Zimbabwe: Part Eleven

How to teach our Children to be heirs of Zimbabwe: Part Eleven

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By Dr Ireen Mahamba

DISCUSSING and listening to Cde E Chitofu, whose Chimurenga name is Mushatagotsi, or Mushatimbi as we affectionately called him, I found myself revisiting the theory of Multiple Intelligences, advanced by Howard Gardner a cognitive psychologist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Cde Chitofu is the current director of the Zimbabwe Foundation for Education with Production (ZIMFEP), he also is a founder member of the ZANU Research Unit from its inception at Chimoio in Mozambique and its only director until independence.
My discussion with him last week was a golden opportunity to tap into his reservoir of experience on education with production which dates back to the liberation struggle.
In the course of these discussions, I was excited to note that the theory of Multiple Intelligence (MI Theory) and Education with Production (EwP) are based on the same fundamental truths.
The theory of Multiple Intelligences posits that at birth each individual is endowed with at least nine intelligences.
In any one individual, these intelligences are developed to varying degrees. Some can be very highly developed, accounting for the phenomenon of prodigies while others may be developed to lesser degrees.
In the incidence of prodigies, a child can be given a guitar for the first time and after 30 minutes they play it like they have been doing so for the last ten years.
These intelligences encompass bodily kinaesthetic intelligence, the domain that caters for mind and body co-ordination responsible for the art of dancing, acrobatics, sports, hand knitting and such like, inter-personal intelligence, the ability to understand others, empathise with them and influence them, intra-personal intelligence, the capacity to understand one’s self and use this to guide one’s behaviour.
The theory also identified musical intelligence, logical mathematical intelligence, spatial intelligence the faculty that enables one to view the spatial world accurately and make transformations of this, then of course linguistic intelligence, and naturalistic intelligence, enabling one to understand nature and existential intelligence dealing with the spiritual.
Given these many intelligences, Gardner’s critique of traditionalist education, its examination system and IQ tests is that they only measure linguistic and logical mathematical intelligence and do not measure the other capacities in the individual representing the rest of the intelligences.
He laments that it is only those who pass these exams who get admitted to prestigious institutions.
It is tragic indeed.
In view of multiple intelligences, a narrow curriculum short changes many students whose stronger competencies lie outside the domains covered by the narrow curriculum.
These are then labelled dumb, whereas if the curriculum was sufficiently broad, their stronger capacities would also be given a chance to develop and they too would shine.
The notion of dumbness is therefore a fallacy, it just depends on which intelligence is under discussion.
Teaching and learning methodology therefore needs to go beyond verbalisation, memorisation, theorising, to include those students whose dominant competencies are outside these domains.
For instance, learners strong in the inter-personal domain who learn better through working with others, helping others, those who learn best through music and dance; so the case is for methodologies that engage the different intelligences, so that as we pan for gold in our students, no grain is left behind.
Gardner sums this up by saying that the purpose of schooling “should be to develop intelligences and to help people reach vocational and avocational goals that are appropriate to their spectrum of intelligences” (Gardner:1983).
Cde Chitofu is in concert with Gardner as he asserts that it is not possible to find a ZIMFEP graduate standing at a street corner selling airtime or cigarettes because education with production produces graduates who are competent to serve society.
Truth is truth; what Gardner discovered in his work as a cognitive psychologist, education with production unearthed and refined through practice. Highlighting one of the most fundamental achievements of education with production, Cde Chitofu underscored that ZIMFEP schools have the most balanced curriculum in the nation encompassing a wide range of ‘academic’ and ‘practical’ subjects.
The strength of this he said, is that each child is bound to find an area in which they are strong and so are able to excel in it.
He disagrees with the traditionalist emphasis on five ‘O’ Levels, citing the rampant unemployment it feeds every year, and its failure to stem the tide of young persons who in the end turn to vagrancy because the avenues for usefulness in our society are closed to people with that type of ‘O’ Level education.
He said that it is pathetic that we have factories lying dormant with machinery and none of our five ‘O’ Level graduates can do anything about it, and yet if we take graduates from Mupfure Self Help College,(a ZIMFEP college), who entered the college without five ‘O’ Levels, they can certainly make the machines run and produce what society needs today.
Mupfure Self Help College is able to turn out skilled graduates without five ‘O’ Levels because five ‘O’ Levels is not an accurate measure of the God-given competencies that each child brings with it.
By targeting a wide range of capacities and refusing to be restricted by the five ‘O’Level theory, education with production has managed to unleash the potential in young persons otherwise undetected by our narrowly theoretical education.
“Each person has many wonders in them,” said Cde Chitofu.
“We must unlock these, once we do that, we will have no more problems.” Traditional education does not have suitable detectors to locate the seams of gold in each child and we are the losers at the end of the day, worse still, we sacrifice the young ones at the altar of elitism.
Cde Chitofu also chronicled stories about the many youngsters he had come across during the struggle and in his education career who had been thrown out of the traditional system and yet once they had found their niche excelled well beyond their counterparts who had passed the traditional exams.
The MI theory clarifies such phenomenon as follows; “a child who learns to multiply easily is not necessarily more intelligent than one who has more difficulty on this task.” (Gardner:1983)
“The child who takes more time to master multiplication may best learn multiplication through a different approach, may excel in a field outside mathematics or may be looking at and understanding the multiplication process at a fundamentally deeper level.
“Such a fundamental understanding can result in slowness and can hide a mathematical intelligence potentially higher than that of a child who quickly memorises the multiplication table despite possessing a shallower understanding of the process of multiplication.”
In traditional education therefore, we barely scratch the surface, and we leave the seams of gold undetected.
Undoubtedly, education with production with its wide range of polytechnical subjects searches for the competencies in each child, ultimately serving the child and society better.
Dr Mahamba is a war veteran and holds a PhD from Havard University. She is currently doing consultancy work.

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