By Dr Ireen Mahamba

IN 1981, President Mugabe, then Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, laid the foundation stone for education in Zimbabwe when he said:
“Education must at all costs eschew all tendencies or even appearances of a commitment to the maintenance and reproduction of the unjust social order and undemocratic value system to the overthrow of which we sacrificed so much in the struggle.” (Education in Zimbabwe Past, Present and Future: 8)
This was a clarion call to all Zimbabweans particularly those involved in education to abandon the Rhodesian colonialist education.
Thus was born the Foundation for Education with Production that year, at the institute of the Minister of Education and Culture then, Comrade Dzingai Mutumbuka.
The Foundation for Education with Production (ZIMFEP) was charged to nurture and develop the educational ideas born and practised during the liberation struggle in Mozambique and Zambia as the ideal that would be spread to the rest of the nation’s schools once it had taken root and flourished in the ZIMFEP schools.
The ZIMFEP schools were best placed to carry out this Great Project because they were manned by students and teachers, who had originated and practised these ideas during the liberation struggle.
They were manned by cadres who believed in this new system and were dedicated to see it succeed in transforming Zimbabwe’s education system, an aspiration they had nursed close to their hearts during the liberation struggle.
They had planned for this during the liberation struggle and longed to work for the transformation of Zimbabwe’s education as an important vehicle in the transformation of the country.
This new revolutionary concept is called Education with Production.
At its core, it involves the elimination of the dichotomy between mental and manual labour, theory and practice and, academic and practical subjects.
During the liberation struggle, our schools had no budget, we did receive donations but this was never sufficient so we had to rely on ourselves as much as possible to meet our requirements.
We used local materials such as black clay, charcoal and some leaves to make blackboards, local soapstone for chalk, local bamboo to make chairs and desks, wood and grass to make beds and mattresses, and we the girls made ceilings for our postos with sack material embroidered in motifs such as:
“ZANLA girls take after Mbuya Nehanda!
“The people are invincible!”
Necessity therefore gave birth to education with production.
While socialist political economy teaches that labour is the source of all wealth, our own material conditions underlined the correctness of this precept.
Hence we taught the children and youths in our schools to be as proud of the products of their hands as they were of their mental work; that “to build a hut is as important as writing an essay” (Mutumbuka: 1978), so they built their huts and they were proud of it, they grew their food and they felt good about it.
This was a radical departure from the colonial practice that instilled elitist attitudes and values in the learners, making them disdainful of manual work.
By using manual work as punishment in schools, colonial education denigrated it to the level where it became an insult to those ‘cursed’ with it.
This is capitalism’s ploy to justify reaping off producers of the profit of their hands while giving them a mere pittance from which they can hardly survive.
The socialist theory of knowledge explains how ideas arise as mankind wrestles with the environment to produce his means of livelihood, and that these ideas are then used to improve his work, his practice, thus the dialectical process goes on. The reality then is that theory comes from practice and is only useful as it informs and guides practice.
Theory and practice are therefore inseparable, they are two sides of the same coin. Hence, to separate theory and practice is to distort reality, it is to disable the learner.
We want the young ones we teach to be true masters of the natural, economic, social and political environment; they cannot turn out to be so if they are miseducated such that they are not fully cognisant of both the theoretical and practical aspects of what they learn.
Consequently, the dichotomy between practical and so called ‘academic’ learning is neither beneficial to the learners nor to society.
The foregoing explains how through our work and study during the liberation struggle, we arrived at a concept of education that overcomes the dichotomy between mental and manual work, theory and practice and, practical and the so called ‘academic’ subjects.
We came up with the idea of education with production or polytechnical education as a synthesis of our own experiences during the struggle and our understanding of socialist thought.

Next week we look into the idea of education with production in detail, we also examine its relevance to the economy of Zimbabwe.

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