TRADITIONALLY the sciences include Biology, the study of living things, Chemistry, the study of substances and how they react with each other and Physics the study of energy and motion.
These are all simple straightforward natural everyday phenomena.
Their study should be demystified by bringing them into the realm of the ordinary.
And yet science is touted as a difficult subject.
The science we fear and hear of today is a fake monster, a ghost that must be exorcised!
In the last episode I talked about demystifying science.
The danger is to get lost in technicalities.
So I thought to discuss real life situations where science is in action as it were.
A few years back I met one of our senior academics in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Zimbabwe.
Over a drink in the Senior Common Room the conversation drifted to agriculture.
He was keeping chickens and had applied a liberal amount of the chicken manure to his maize plot in Domboshawa during the past cropping season.
The maize did extremely well with the chicken manure, but when he tried the same trick the following year the results were disastrous.
On further discussion we found that the ‘following year’ had been much drier with less rain.
He wanted to know how the chicken manure failed to work when there was less rain.
You probably think the answer is obvious!
I explained to him in Shona how water moves from where it is plentiful to where there is relatively less of it, like from the soil into the root.
If, however, we add manure to the soil, then water will be drawn from the roots into the soil, now full of salts from the manure.
I explained that the effect was similar to how we make biltong, (chimukuyu).
Pieces of meat sprinkled with salt quickly dry up as the water is literally sucked out by the salt.
So the chicken manure in his soil was ‘sucking the water’ from the maize roots into the soil.
There was little or no rain to replenish the soil water.
The maize wilted and could not grow well.
I also explained that water wets and sticks to the soil particles.
The roots have to work extra hard to pull water into themselves.
With a drought in hand, it is even tougher for roots to draw water.
This was the science behind the reduced maize yield in the dry year.
Let me also explain that there is a whole plateful of English scientific jargon to explain what I have just described.
Students struggle with the English jargon which now passes for science!
The concept revolves on what the English call ‘osmosis’.
It says water moves from an area of lower concentration of dissolved salts to an area where there are more salts.
Like the salts added in the chicken manure!
Now that is the ‘science’ that gives our students a headache.
Put simply, it is the English vocabulary that mystifies science.
The answer is to teach science in the language that students can understand.
Remove the fuss about English language; concentrate on the science, the things that are happening!
The senior academic was impressed by my simple explanation of what were otherwise complicated scientific principles.
I had explained the ‘science’ behind drought in simple easy to understand terms, in language that he could understand.
You must have come across many people who struggle to explain a thing in their ‘mother’ tongue.
They end up saying, “Ah it is too difficult to explain in Ndebele/Shona.”
So they resort to the Queen’s language, to the delight of all those present, including those who cannot understand a word!
Politicians are particularly notorious for this practice of using a foreign language to speak to people in the village!
You cannot blame them; that is how they were educated!
The education must change!
There is talk of making Science, Technology and Mathematics (STEM) the bedrock of our education.
How do we popularise Science and Mathematics?
Already people in the humanities are complaining of being left out.
There is a turf war now following Professor Jonathan Moyo’s tweet that it is Science and Mathematics that must be central, especially for tertiary institutions.
The turf war is based on the old model where different disciplines are viewed as finite bodies which have their own existence outside us the people.
Academics are defending empty territory; when the people go home they leave the papers in the offices.
Let us take Mathematics.
It is the knowledge on how to measure, calculate, quantify the things around us so we know how much we have or need to buy, manufacture or import.
Mathematics allows us to quantify our environment and to plan accordingly.
Zimbabwe has a whole department to deal with Central Statistics.
Without statistics we cannot plan anything to move Zimbabwe forward.
In a sense each one of us must behave like a quantity surveyor of sorts, able to work out how much of each item we need.
Mathematics enables us to manipulate numbers so as to understand if we are progressing or not.
Put simply if we cannot measure what we are doing, then we do not know what we are doing.
We need Mathematics to do that.
If we do not know where we are at a given time, then we will never get anywhere, literally.
So those who think Mathematics should be left to the intelligent few are mistaken.
Mathematics is for everyone.
There will be brilliant mathematicians, average ones, mediocre ones, but all citizens must be mathematically literate.
The vendors, the korokozas, the kombi crews, Mbuya vaMuchigere vari kumusha, all of us must be able to quantify our immediate surroundings, whether it is money, distance, crop yield, amount of cooking oil left in the bottle or just how much sadza to leave for the three children who have gone to school.
The utility value of Science and Mathematics is not appreciated as they are school subjects ‘divorced’ from everyday life.
We have not been educating our children for life, but for examinations, themselves stepping stones to a life somewhere in the city or in England or America perhaps.
Examinations are an integral part of evaluating achievement so we can allocate our human resources according to capacity to undertake given tasks.
Passing examinations is not the aim of teaching Mathematics, Science or any subject for that matter.
The aim of teaching mathematics is to equip individuals with number and calculation skills so that they can exploit the quantitative dimensions of their existence.
And Science allows us to understand our very existence.
Where do examinations come in?
So the point is to look at how we teach these subjects: Science and Mathematics.
We have to re-orient our education system from an examination focus to learning about life focus.
Teachers colleges have a major paradigm shift to undertake.
That must include an ideological paradigm shift.
Teachers should become Afrocentric in their orientation to life and education.
They must believe in the supremacy of the black man’s cause.
It is teachers who will help us to move out of the whiteman’s shadows to become ourselves.
This is a mammoth task.
We must stop educating people to go to Europe and America, but to go to Zimbabwe!
Teachers must help children to believe in themselves.