By Dr Tafataona Mahoso
SCIENCE, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) refers to the ‘science’ subjects which the Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology have decided to sponsor through scholarships for the 2015 Ordinary Level examinations class which started Advanced Level in 2016 at public schools.
Sponsorship is offered through the Zimbabwe Manpower Development Fund (ZIMDEF).
The programme appears to be a piecemeal crash project. There was no systematic nationwide research done on the project and many stakeholders must have been taken by surprise and therefore unable to offer any alternative approaches to the pressing needs to boost science and technology for innovation and productivity.
Historically, such an approach to education has tended to worsen rather than improve national education policies.
The reason is that there are many silent and unexamined assumptions.
Stakeholders are confronted with a fait-accompli whose consequences remain unknown.
In Aid and Education in the Developing World, Kenneth King described the process and strategy of project-driven higher education policy in Africa at the time of SAPS, as follows:
“What is intriguing about this part of the analysis is the implication that something positive and promising was in place to which serious damage was then done (which SAP and the agencies would fix.) No (scientific) evidence is offered of what actually was in place…but it would seem that in many countries this 30-to-40 year-old tradition (of post-independence African education) is being undone (via SAP) without any very clear idea of the current social composition of Africa’s universities.”
The World Bank and its allied agencies would simply sponsor a hypothesis about African higher education or African science education.
Without waiting for the hypothesis to be tested, more projects or programmes would be sponsored and funded to enforce the unproven hypothesis or allegations as if they were a scientific law.
We wonder, for instance, why STEM has been introduced while BEAM is no longer being funded.
The agency driven encirclement and infiltration of African higher education, according to King, begins with innocent-looking and innocent-sounding projects. Then it widens to whole programmes and finally it ends up with control of the national educational policy of the whole country.
The research findings which have led to STEM remain unclear.
The first assumption which is not articulated is the definition of a ‘science’ subject and the supposed ripple-effects which supporting that subject at the expense of many others is supposed to have on the overall society and its development.
What exactly is the prevailing paradigm of science in Zimbabwe and in the Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology?
The old science and technology paradigm which has brought us what Naomi Klein calls The Dominance Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism was based on Newtonian physics and Darwinist biology.
It is called ‘a science of the dead universe’ in which the ‘scientist’ is treated as the only clever animal.
Under that paradigm, it would make perfect sense to take a project-by-project approach to the promotion of a science revolution intended to uplift research, innovation, entrepreneurship and industrial production.
It would make sense to select an elite group of young students to be favoured with free tuition while others failed to attend school for lack of support and due to poverty.
But in the aftermath of disaster capitalism and environmental catastrophe there is ‘an emerging shift in the basic paradigm of science from the metaphor of the machine to the metaphor of the self-organising living organism’.
According to David Korten, citing Mae-Wan Ho, the emphasis moves from segregation and isolation to co-ordination, which is to say it is a relational approach and against piece-meal approaches.
“The stability (and dynamism) of organisms (including institutions and societies) depends on all parts of the system being informed, participating and acting appropriately in order to maintain the whole.”
So, the selectivity underlying STEM has not been articulated and justified in terms of long-term policy for the entire education sector.
The second assumption is that the ‘STEM revolution’ or the focus on Maths, Biology, Physics and Chemistry for the 2015 ‘O’ Level cohorts will ‘stemitise’ all the other fields of study which have been excluded from sponsorship in this project.
I take this to mean that the Ministry believes that from now on all the excluded disciplines will be forced gradually to imitate or reflect the precision, thoroughness, accuracy, predictability and consistency which is generally expected of mathematics, biology, physics and chemistry.
The Ministry believes it can redirect and control the entire education sector through STEM.
This is neo-liberal scientism and technicism.
As Egbert Schuurman has written: “Technicism reflects a fundamental attitude which seeks to control reality, to resolve all problems with the use of scientific-technological methods and tools.”
But that reality, the entire education sector, has not been consulted or explored to establish that it can be transformed through a STEM revolution based on a narrow cohort of publics.
The third assumption is that investment in the 2015 ‘O’ Level cohorts will be more efficient and more effective than simply investing in science-teaching infrastructure and science teachers, which would mean ZIMDEF focusing on the college and university students doing science and technology subjects, so that they finish their degrees and join the productive sector.
For instance, the question was asked: “What will happen to STEM students after they complete ‘A’ Level; whether Government through ZIMDEF will continue to fund their education until they become productive scientists and engineers.
The answer was that this was still being thought-out.
Another question was why ZIMDEF was not supporting STEM students already doing attachment and close to becoming productive.
The answer was that the Ministry’s policy on attachment was still being reviewed.
The idea that choosing a small group to sponsor and support will force the ‘losers’ to adapt is a well-established World Bank tactic.
Yet in the emerging science paradigm, the whole system in which the STEM project is supposed to operate and benefit society must be taken into consideration without dividing participants between winners and losers, let alone assuming that losers will be forced to imitate winners, whatever that is supposed to mean.
One illustration can be used to demonstrate the need to question assumptions underlining STEM.
One of the most promising national projects in terms of innovation and productivity is the radio and television digitisation project.
Once the engineers and technicians finish constructing and testing the infrastructure, what would be needed of them is maintenance and repair of the system.
The biggest responsibility for innovation and productivity leading to profitable media products for local and foreign consumption will no longer lie on the shoulders of STEM graduates.
It will lie on the shoulders of local content producers most of whom have to come from non-STEM disciplines such as journalism, film, mass communication, theatre, dance, choreography, story-telling, literature, poetry, wildlife, conservation and agriculture.
In other words, if the purpose of STEM is to boost research, innovation and productivity, it should include the disciplines which can contribute the most toward the creation of original African content to fill the scores of new radio and television channels made possible by digitisation.
Yet the STEM concept appears to exclude altogether the dire need for content production for national TV, radio and film.
This need for such innovation is urgent, but it is not reflected in the STEM programme. This is just one example.