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Open letter to the Prime Minister
2006-01-29 14:58:22
By Charles Mustapha Kayoka
Speaking to members of parliament at the beginning of the week, the prime minister, Edward Lowassa said that statistics from 14 regions indicate that about 61.9 percent of primary school graduates who passed their exams failed to get places in secondary schools.
He said recent improved performance in primary schools has resulted in higher grades in the final national examinations.
Premier Lowassa’s quick solution to the problem of too few places in secondary schools is the government, of course working jointly with local governments and wananchi, to embark on a mega project of building more secondary schools.
It is understood that the current drive of the government is to ensure that each ward has a secondary school.
He is quoted as reminding MPs thus; ”One of the priorities of the fourth phase government is education. The mentioned statistics pose a challenge to us in the government, you MPs, citizens and other stakeholders in our development. We must have a strategy to curb this situation as soon as possible.\’
I find this proposal of having a secondary school in each ward very problematic, for two reasons.
One, having more schools means that the government should also embark on a mega project for training more teachers.
The government should be reminded that with the increase in establishment of private primary and secondary schools there has been unchecked migration of teachers to these schools, seeking better pay.
This migration has made public schools run short of academic staff. So, with the shortage of teachers in the existing primary and secondary schools, how are we going to find enough teachers for the new schools?
Two, we have been already witnesses to massive projects of expanding educational access.
I am referring to the Universal Primary Education (UPE), and how it compromised quality for there were quite simply not enough teachers.
School supplies dwindled, if not stopped altogether; classes were organized under the shade of trees, in shaky grass thatched,and mud walled class rooms, with primary school graduates teaching fellow primary school colleagues.
Literacy shot up to about 95 percent in the 1980s and it was something to boast about. But poor vision, and lack of dynamism on the part of policy planners lead to a pathetic fall in the literacy rate to around 65 percent by the year 2000, and the downward trend will continue if nothing is done.
While we are celebrating the said good performance in primary schools as a result of PEDP, we are forgetting that most of those graduating will soon revert to semi-illiteracy, and may be total ignorance sooner or later, due to several factors which include lack of sustained reading habits, lack of access to sources of reading materials, lack of role models to emulate, and general complacency toward reading as a necessary activity for a person who seeks information.
But we also have to remind ourselves that both at individual and government level, we are not an information seeking and generating society.
We only seek information to pass exams, and the information has to be chewed by a facilitator at tuition classes.
When the exams are over, the search for information is no longer a necessity .
I would like to suggest that we should be considering universalizing secondary education, at least O level secondary education.
And I have reasons for that.
First, most children finish standard seven when they are only 12 or 13 years of age.
At that age they are too young to start taking on responsibilities at family or community level.
They are also too young to have any sense of personal responsibility, independence and ability to know what they want without close supervision. Secondly, most of these graduates come from the poor.
A correct guess is that of the 62 percent left-outs, the majority of them come from poor families, thus unable to send their children for further education.
(And its is also true that even among the children who have passed and have been selected to join secondary education, there will be a good number who will not be able to go because their parents cannot afford to pay school fees, small as they are, pay for transport or buy school uniforms and other necessary supplies.)
Now what becomes of them by the time they reach 19 or 20 years of age?
There is a good possibility that they will revert to ignorance, remain poor since their inadequate education disallows them from getting paid jobs, the majority will probably marry fellow ignorant partners, and thereby recycle ignorance.
But another factor is that with the need to hasten social and cultural change, and to realize faster economic development, we need to have everybody to become an effective stakeholder.
Such a possibility requires the country to have people who have a certain amount of basic education which makes them dynamic and able to absorb innovations or new ideas, and, as has advised Ambassador Juma Mwapachu, who are also able to generate and seek information useful to their existence and businesses, and for the life of the nation in general.
I wonder if the current prevalence of primary seven graduate citizens is what we want to continue with, people who start the day and end it by reading the popular press, and jam the lines phoning-in to send salaams on the radios to their loved ones. Those who will switch off a radio that runs news bulletins in favour of an all music studio.
If I may ask, for instance, how can we make a computer innovation university when all of us end up with only primary education? I bet that even if the computers use Kiswahili, as they are soon going to do, only a few of us primary seven leavers will be able to adopt them as serious and sustainable working tools.
With an appropriate drive to upgrade the teachers (let us say all primary school teachers should be instructed to upgrade to diploma level), administering consistent on-the-job instruction on more modern pedagogical training; using existing funds, instead of establishing completely new and separate structures for secondary schools in each ward, to increase the number of classrooms to accommodate secondary school facilities and staff.
Thus pupils, once starting primary one, are guaranteed of reaching secondary education provided appropriate checks are put in place to avoid compromising the quality of the education delivered.
Parents can be asked to start contributing to the education of their children from the time they are enrolled in primary one, knowing that the children will end up with secondary education qualifications provided they pass their exams.
What we also need is to fine tune the curricula so that children will make smooth transitions into secondary education upon reaching and successfully finishing primary seven.
Of course we know that not every child will turn out to be secondary school material, but what we will be sure of is that most of the right materials will go through while the system sees to those who cannot make it to the highest level.
I guess, if we all sit down and think about this and other proposals, we shall not be required to build new schools for each ward to accommodate secondary school left-outs, for we shall have none, except the usual wayward elements.
I therefore ask the fourth phase government to sit down once again with all stakeholders and explore all the workable possibilities, and make secondary education universal.
projetvoix@yahoo.com
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