via Govt starts revamping education curriculum – DailyNews Live 28 November 2014
HARARE – President Robert Mugabe’s government is revamping the education system, which experts say is colonial-based and out of sync with Zimbabwean ideals.
This comes exactly a month after ZimRights held a series of provincial conferences where education experts called on Mugabe’s administration to revamp the education system.
And yesterday, Education minister, Lazarus Dokora, announced his ministry will hold public consultations to review the education curriculum.
“Guided by the need for a new, fit-for-purpose curriculum, the ministry will lead a process of public consultations to obtain views or inputs of the entire nation, on Friday 28 November 2014,” Dokora said in a statement.
“Consultations will be conducted at every school, and there will be a consultation centre in each district and province as well as national consultation level. Please, seize the chance to input the kind of knowledge, skills, values and attitudes that our new curriculum should impact to graduates of the school system.”
The review comes as education experts crank up pressure on Dokora to review the curriculum.
As reported by the Daily News, twice in October, there have been growing calls for Mugabe’s government to bin the archaic and colonial education system which is blamed for the poor pass rate that has continued to stalk Zimbabwe’s education.
Borniface Chisaka, director of research at the Zimbabwe Open University (Zou), warned last month that without revamping the education system, including educating teachers, standards will continue to plummet.
“At the time of independence, the colonial government was training teachers. We appeared to have continued training,” Chisaka told the delegates to the ZimRights Mashonaland West provincial people’s conference in Chinhoyi.
“This was a British colonial system and we have maintained that. We are training people on the job not teaching people on the job. When you train people you are inviting lots of problems; because people behave in the manner they were trained, they don’t think and they don’t adapt.”
Since independence, Zimbabwe’s pass rate has ranged between a paltry 18-25 percent.
ZimRights is holding 10 provincial meetings with a view to interrogate socio-economic and cultural rights against the new Constitution, bill of rights and government economic blueprint ZimAsset.
So far, the revamp of the education curriculum has dominated the meetings held in Mashonaland West and Masvingo provinces.
COMMENTS
The present system is NOT a heritage of the colonial system. At a well know private primary school I was trained in carpentry. Thus knowledge has helped me to date in any carpentry project.
At high school the A stream technical drawing in form 1, but purely academic subjects after that, but B and C stream did academic plus woodwork and technical drawing.
And africans all did cambridge pre 1980, which was rejected by nationalists.
This colonial system was rejected and replaced by all streams doing academic subjects they were not suited for and failed for 30 years. Now the children are going back to the colonial system. .. with practical subjects. Unfortunately only private schools do the once rejected cambridge system that is now universally admired and desired by zimbabweans, while children now do the despised Zimbabwean local exams fraught with pre exam sales of papers.
Zanu…they contaminate everything in the name of fighting colonialism.
If you see Mugabe and his club sending their children and accessing services in Singapore or Hong Kong they are simply trying to access the British Colonial type of service indirectly and pretend to us anything British is evil.
Note he doesn’t send his children to Cuba, Nicaragua or North Korea or later on for himself to go for a holiday there. Why? The schools and facilities that he enjoys there at our expense are modelled along western systems. Systems which most of his supporting countries like China have now adopted after their models had failed.
A psychoanalysis of Mugabe like Banda, and Idi Amin would indicate at heart he wishes he was British hence the rhetoric and a sense of feeling inferior to the them. To compensate for that he ends up studying more than necessary to prove a point, and adopt and learn their language more than the average British himself.
Sorry Zimbabwe.