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| Features |
| Breaking the backbone |
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by
Bright Molande, 07 June 2006
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06:57:46
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“Children are the most vulnerable citizens of any society and [yet] the greatest of our treasures,” once said Nelson Mandela, a statesman who measured his political will in terms of posterity. Yes, it takes national leadership more than mere politics to seriously think about a future generation—a fact whose one secret is education.
Mandela passionately desired to “make every home, every shack or rickety structure a centre of learning” in breaking the backbone of apartheid.
Despite the political will of Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda, it appears our education system has largely emphasised “what the child should know” as opposed to sharpening critical thinking, the questioning skills that lead to invention. It is not an education for self-reliance and production.
But it certainly did not take an Albert Einstein to know all there was to be known in order to invent. It took an Isaac Newton to question the falling of an apple to discover the laws of motion that have meant immeasurable strides in technology like the aeroplane.
And we have only bent on memorising and using the discovered scientific laws in servicing ready-made technology made elsewhere as if God made us any less than the humanity that makes its own strides. We have largely been making a parrot culture, a parrot people; making a consuming rather than a productive culture; breaking the soul of endogenous development.
President Bingu wa Mutharika is taking Malawi towards an endogenous development in order to turn round the country’s fortunes.
The basis of this development is a collective mindset that every society is capable of transforming itself from within. It is Mutharika’s most important promise and generations will measure his legacy against this promise. This legacy needs a backup education system.
The collective mindset of starting with our overflowing inner wealth is not possible with the present education curriculum.
Just as it took Bakili Muluzi’s laissez faire attitude and his sloppy education architects to break the backbone of education in Malawi, it must certainly take Mutharika’s political will and listening to sound advice to reverse this situation.
Otherwise, his vision of Malawi will be short-lived since there will not be an education system to carry the vision into posterity.
The spirit of “being endogenous” must be seen in the curriculum and the approaches of teaching as well as learning in the classroom; in “every home, every shack or rickety structure”—wherever we have “a centre of learning”.
We must hear its fury when every Cabinet Minister breathes, smell its fire in our Honourable Members just we as see it blazing on the tongue of the State President if our land is to transform from a consuming to a producing society.
But are the education policy and resources truly engendering the very critical thinking that becomes the backbone of being a producing society? No. Our education system does not focus on critical thinking yet. We often test it rather than cultivate it.
A typical example is when we wisely said literature must be optional in secondary school. We broke part of the intellectual backbone, deliberately cut the nerve of morality, of culture, of critical thinking and rendered an entire generation intellectual paralysis.
We cut one vessel of morality in the school. Nobody thought literature is an effective positive propaganda against violence and other social ills, a vehicle for inculcating the cultural soul of a people and has so been long before the coming of English Literature.
We killed the reading and writing culture and lied to this nation that even your own vernacular literature, “stories about your own people, culture and in your own language are not necessary for you”. Today, we are deploring poor communication skills especially in English.
It took a lack of political will to turn this country from a consuming one that we cared little cultivating critical thinking through literature. Anyone could pass examinations without learning in the classroom.
The nation caught this disease and joined by indifference or otherwise in fulfilling the day’s lack of political will to cultivate critical thinking. The media too cheered on. They, too, do not seem to know the importance of literature. The editors are intently killing literature in their own way—“Killing the Short Story” as Steve Chimombo lately observes in Malawi News of the past two weeks.
But perhaps, we have been teaching literature and we have not taught these editors anything about literature. The teachers may also be to blame. We are a nation that values entertainment more than cultivating our critical faculties through a reading culture.
In a typical testimony, there are six full pages lavished at sports in Malawi News, four pages in Weekend Nation against the maximum of two mean pages for literature. Companies bestow millions of Kwacha into sports when no one is buying books for schools to revive reading and writing culture long lost. We little realise the potency of a reading culture in development.
Unless there is an open political will and collective support to cultivate critical thinking through the education system, the colourful dreams to become a producing nation will never have a long term intellectual backbone.
If the past is indeed to learn from, then we must learn that we broke the intellectual backbone of this country and accept it. Accept that the education factory is still busy manufacturing consumers rather than producers of knowledge, culture and technology.
If the present is for us to manage, then we must work on the present curriculum to cultivate critical thinking and promote subjects that nurture our moral being besides teaching skills and technology. A whole education must teach the head (critical thinking), the heart (helping one to be affective or humane) and the hand (technological and business skills). Restoring the teaching of literature and overhauling our teaching sciences become critical here.
Did we hear Minister of Economic Planning David Faiti in yesterday’s paper say some industries are worried with low quality of analytical and writing skills in new graduates?
He was right to suggest that the education system is not shaping pupils and students to be producers. It is good a Cabinet Minister has made this observation. But what next?
Political will must change the mindset of the Ministry of Education technocrats who seem not very keen on the intellectual development of their own teachers who are aspiring to upgrade at Chancellor College even when we know that this is one way of mopping up the past mess of teachers trained in half-measures.
If the future, the destiny of our posterity, is for us to change, then we must act now if we must break the backbone of poverty, the evil backbone of our times. But it will take political will to make our education back up our cherished policy dreams.
The author is a scholar in literary and cultural theory at Chancellor College.
—Feedback: amolande@chanco.unima.mw |
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