Learning for Life, Work and the Future Initial ... - Unesco-Unevoc

Learning for Life, Work and the Future Participants’ Papers Page 63
enable the school leaver to move directly into the
world of work, either formal or informal, and with little
further training to earn a living as a semi-skilled or
skilled worker.
3. Situation at Independence
At independence, most former colonial countries
demonstrate great enthusiasm and commitment to
massive industrialisation and commercialisation of the
economy and the cherished modernisation of life for
everybody. A commitment is made to redesign curricula
to ensure that appropriate skills and attitudes are
imparted to pupils, who will be able to appreciate the
role of productive work and undertake it. The products
of all educational institutions, in the final analysis, are
supposed to be relevant to their economies as these
transform. They are supposed not only to be able to
maintain what is there, but to invent and discover
appropriate technology which the countries’ material
conditions demand from time to time.
However, as time goes on, these high hopes of
matching school curricula with the needs of the
economy are usually dashed. Cosmetic modifications
alone are effected in the curriculum, mainly involving
a mere change of names and the introduction of some
low-level type of practical education that is not likely
to lead to the desired transformation of the economy.
In SADC countries a rash of slogans appeared, such as
“Education with Production” in Zimbabwe, “Education
for Self Reliance” in Tanzania, and “Humanist Education”
in Zambia.
In Zimbabwe, nine Zimbabwe Foundation for Education
with Production (ZIMFEP) Schools were set up
at independence, but even in these schools, intended to
spearhead technical/vocational education in the
country, productive activities were separated from the
academic curriculum. The latter remained superior and
continued to follow the traditional technical thrust,
dominating all curriculum activity, until the so-called
practical subjects were swallowed up and again relegated
to second fiddle. Consequently, access to true
technical/vocational education in the schools system in
Zimbabwe has become just a dream.
4. Philosophical Backing for Academic Education
This continued thrust towards what has come to be
called “academic rationalism” has been abetted by the
activities of most Examination Boards in the former
colonial countries. To these bodies, localisation means
adopting or adapting the aims and objectives of the
former colonial system together with its thinking and
modus operandi. The change in their names is, again,
mainly cosmetic. In Anglo-Saxon countries practical
subjects like home economics and carpentry have
remained intact, faithful to the British tradition in spite
of the existence of viable commerce, industry and
informal sectors in these countries. The result is that
relevant technical/vocational education is anathema in
the primary and secondary school system in most
SADC countries such as Zimbabwe.
Perhaps this strong commitment to theory by secondary
schools, and indeed conventional universities,
derives from historical and philosophical ideas about
“worthwhile” knowledge inherited from SADC’s
colonial past. Based on the Aristotelian dichotomy
between theoretical and practical knowledge, the
conviction that theory should be accorded a higher
status than practice persists today in a variety of forms.
The Zimbabwean Experience
The British brought this warped academic paradigm to
their colonies and deliberately made “academic” education
available to the colonisers, while “practical”
education was availed to the colonised. The work of
Loram in Natal at the turn of the 20 th century, and that
of Kegwin and Jowitt in the 1920s and 1930s, in
setting up low-level craft institutions for Africans only,
such as Thsolothso and Domboshave in the then
Southern Rhodesia, is well-known. In Rhodesia, in the
1960s, this approach was carried into the secondary
schools through the F(2) system, whose objectives
were to confirm the supply of its products into the
Rhodesian reserves if male, and into housewives if
female. Practical subjects were thus limited to growing
vegetables and rearing domestic animals such as
chickens and rabbits − subsistence activities only.
Access to true technical/vocational education was
reserved for the whites in institutions such as the then
Salisbury Polytechnic and Bulawayo Technical
College. The infrastructure in place in the various
secondary schools was not put to good use. No wonder
all the F(2) schools were converted to academic institutions
soon after independence.
5. Attitudes
The greatest impediment to access to true technical/
vocational education by the majority of primary and
secondary school pupils seems to be the attitude of
people involved in education, be they politicians,
managers and administrators, practitioners, parents or
the pupils themselves. Unfortunately the decisionmakers
in education, the new black elites, themselves
possess an academic education and believe that this
type of education is the best for the country. It is therefore
understandable that parents should want an
academic education for their children, since it is
erroneously believed to lead to white collar jobs and
salaried employment and the consequent ‘good life’ −
a myth that is disproved daily in present-day
Zimbabwe.
The result of this is that politicians and education
managers continue to allocate more financial, material