HomeOld_PostsWhat you want to teach is what determines your objectives

What you want to teach is what determines your objectives

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IT cannot work backwards.
If you want to teach about love, respect, kindness, you state these in your objectives.
When you want to teach about love of one’s country, about sovereignty, being able to rule yourselves no matter who or what, about self-sacrifice, about collective consciousness, dedication, heroism, you state the objective categorically. So that when you teach, you cannot miss out anything so special that you want to teach and the children do not miss out on anything so special that has been planned for their learning.
When you want to teach about ownership of the nation’s resources, harnessing them to produce what the nation needs to survive, you state this categorically in the teaching and learning objectives.
There is nothing mystical or hidden about this.
Whatever you want to teach is what you state in the objectives.
The affective you want to teach, the moral, ethical and aesthetic attitudes, values and feelings you want to teach, you capture them in your affective objectives, which are also known as the socio-cultural or ideological objectives.
The specific knowledge you want to teach about any discipline, the specifics about the body of knowledge of the discipline you want to teach is what you capture in the scientific objectives, commonly known as knowledge objectives.
The particular skills endemic to the discipline that you want to teach, for instance, in mathematics we are looking at skills of the logico-mathematical realm, these are what you capture in the skills objectives.
So the task of each person purporting to develop curriculum for any discipline is to clearly conceive for each discipline, the moral, ethical and aesthetic attitudes, values and feelings pertaining to this discipline and enunciate them clearly in the objectives for the teaching and learning of that discipline.
It is to be very clear about the body of knowledge of the discipline they want to teach and to capture this in the knowledge/scientific objectives for the teaching and learning of the discipline.
It is to be succinctly clear about the nature of the skills that characterise the discipline and then capture these in the skills objectives for the teaching and learning of that discipline.
They have to accurately conceive of the scientific nature of the discipline in question if they are to do justice to it.
Thus for instance, in mathematics and science, we are mainly involved with logico-mathematical intelligence as well as naturalistic intelligence.
In history we are involved mainly in intra-personal intelligence, inter-personal intelligence, these two social intelligences mainly.
Without such clarity, everything can be so befuddled no-one can make sense of it.
The artists weave a beautiful tapestry from the social intelligences, naturalistic intelligence, spatial-temporal intelligence as well as the bodily kinesthetic intelligence.
Without the affective objectives, it means we are saying there is no teaching of moral, ethical and aesthetic attitudes, values and feelings.
The purportment in this is that you want to create robots, beings with no soul and this can only be of value to those who want to control others, but in our case such is not correct nor desirable because we are building a Zimbabwe in which Zimbabweans are in control of their destiny not one in which they are controlled by others.
When in Rhodesia’s schools they taught us about the so-called Pioneer Column, the intention was to divest us of our soul which said we were Zimbabweans with sole ownership rights over Zimbabwe, a sovereign people responsible for and in-charge of their destiny.
When we choose to call them by their true name, that they were bandits, we restore our soul to ourselves, that we were and are a sovereign people who were criminally invaded by foreign armed robbers.
This acknowledgment of the truth restores for us and in us the feelings that it is right and just for us to fight for what is ours.
This, our describing the British who invaded and occupied our country at gunpoint as bandits is that which is consonant with their barbarous behaviour of displaying in their museum, the skulls of our ancestors whom they beheaded because they demanded their inalienable right to Zimbabwe as their land.
They displayed them as part of their collections in botany, entomology, paleontology, mineralogy and zoology.
They displayed their skulls as part of 80 million specimens.
They displayed them together with fossils of dinosaurs, insects and animals.
This is how they demeaned and stripped them of their humanity, they made them part of their nature study.
They were no more than their trophies of their conquest of the rebellious wild.
It is our right and no-one else’s to define ourselves.
We allow others to define us at our own peril.
Tatadza kukanganwa isu, kukanganwa takoniwa.
Dr Mahamba is a war veteran and holds a PhD from Havard University. She is currently doing consultancy work.

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