HomeOld_PostsScience for building our economy: Who is afraid of science?

Science for building our economy: Who is afraid of science?

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IN the last episode we argued that schools and universities must be engaged in tooling and re-tooling the students so they acquire the requisite skills and knowledge to build Zimbabwe’s economy.
Science must stand tall in this effort.
If school and college curricula are not geared to produce productive citizens with a solid grounding in sciences, then we might as well close them; they are a sheer waste of scarce national resources.
In this episode we shall attempt to show how science has acquired the negative tag of being a ‘failing’ subject.
We also show that this myth about science as a failing subject is a deliberate ploy to stifle African development.
As part of that effort we also need to demystify science.
There is an often whispered myth that the sciences are failing subjects.
Gender bias even has it that girls find science subjects to be more difficult than do boys.
It is not difficult to link these false myths to the colonial mentality deliberately cultivated among African colonised communities.
‘Science’ came with the whiteman.
The whiteman created around himself a superiority complex.
‘Science’ was the whiteman’s wisdom, a wisdom falsely claimed to be superior to that of blacks.
Therefore ‘science’ was assumed to be superior to the intelligence of the black man.
The whiteman brought many gadgets whose operation was said to be scientific. The black man was deliberately kept ignorant of the working of these modern gadgets.
It was argued, falsely, that the science and technology associated with various modern gadgets was above the comprehension of the black man.
Science assumed an aura of superiority which has persisted up to date.
Only when the demand for skilled labour far exceeded the available white labour force did the whiteman reluctantly open the education door a little for blacks to learn ‘science’ so they could service his factories as technicians, not full scientists and engineers.
The current shortage of skilled technical manpower is a legacy of our colonial period.
I have it on good authority that black students attending the University of Rhodesia and Nyasaland and later University of Rhodesia were deliberately failed in science subjects in their very first year of study at the Mount Pleasant campus.
Many of these alleged science ‘failures’ went on to obtain first class science degrees in renowned British and American universities, ample evidence that they had not failed, but were ‘failed’.
Science, we are told, is learnt in a special room called a laboratory.
Laboratories are largely absent in many African schools even today.
Where laboratories are present, they are often poorly equipped due to financial constraints or lack of appreciation of the critical role of science in our day-to-day lives.
The colonial governments in Rhodesia had little appetite for spreading science education among Africans.
It was ‘science’ that they thought gave them a competitive edge over Africans and so they jealously guarded against its spread to black people.
This situation has reinforced the exclusivity and presumed superiority of science!
Generations of black Zimbabweans have come to accept, wrongly, that ‘science’ is a difficult subject to study and understand.
‘Science’ has been used as one of the barriers to keep Africans out of lucrative high-paying technical jobs.
Ultimately depriving Africans access to science education has been the main hindrance to economic advancement after independence.
It is part of our colonial burden.
It is time we in Zimbabwe offloaded colonial baggage of myths about science being too difficult a subject to take on science and technology as development tools.
But did Africans first come into contact with ‘science’ when the whiteman first came to Africa?
That question leads us to ask: “Chinonzi sainzi chii?” (What is science?).
‘Science’ simply means knowledge.
For knowledge to be ‘scientific’ it must be collected in a way that removes bias or personal preferences or favour.
People from different places who seek information about a particular thing, must all come to the same conclusions if they do it systematically and without bias, i.e. if they use the scientific method.
The method of collecting information without favour or bias is called the scientific method.
Such knowledge is what we call ‘science’.
Certain methods and procedures have been developed in studying both social and natural phenomena in such a way that only the true situation is described.
These methods are said to be scientific.
Defined simply, science is the unbiased true information about our surroundings, our environment.
What is so difficult about observing our surroundings and designing ways of solving our problems?
In the next episode we shall continue to demystify science as part of the process of liberating ourselves so we can see how it truly contributes to building our economy.
The struggle for economic emancipation continues!

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