The ManicaPost
Morris Mtisi Post Correspondent
THE word education is derived from a Latin word ‘educare’ which means “to withdraw”. This means education is a process of withdrawing from the leaner’s mind or brain. The thought, therefore, that teaching and educating are the same cannot be farther from the truth.
Teaching precisely refers to “telling”, which is what teachers do in the classroom while the learner is literally “being told”. And that cannot be educating the individual who wants to learn. What is it then? you may ask? That is schooling.
When you educate pupils you are withdrawing what the heads are endowed with, and not assuming the learners carry empty heads. The students’ heads are not tabula-rasa (empty tables or slates). There is something in each of those little heads waiting to be guided or directed into some meaningful end. Think first, all the time you use the word education. Chances are you mean schooling.
Basically if you carefully and honestly examine school curricula, you will notice the curriculum . . . all the learning areas, are mainly a business of telling and being told stories, facts, theories, and all of it. This is schooling. Education involves much more. It involves character and personality building. It involves training in self-discipline, having a heart or conscience, nurturing Ubunthu, discovering one’s gift or talent as given by God and not just philosophising about it. Education involves critical thinking and analysis of things, active participation in what must be taught and learnt, engagement in constructive dialogue, discussion and debate. These attributes will help the learner to feel for others and not to be selfish, to love others, feel for the poor and suffering and to live not only for oneself, but for others — to be incorruptible.
This is a discussion that obviously needs more time and careful analytical thought to understand. For now I hope the difference between educating and schooling is sufficiently clear. I hope the distinction between having been educated and having attended school is amply clear. Our Zimbabwean education system literally schools people; does not educate them. Now, that must begin to make sense. When I then speak about an education system that schools people but does not educate them, I hope I am making some sense that does not need someone to be a robotic scientist.
How does an education system produce a majority of people who think and feel the same way; people who are selfish, insensitive to the plight of the poor and suffering, corrupt, executive thieves and criminals who think only about themselves, their families, friends and relatives and no one else? How does an education system produce people who are deeply embedded in self-aggrandisement, people who steal from their own government, who embezzle funds that are supposed to develop facilities that benefit communities, steal from the poor and suffering, convert money, food and clothes donated to victims of natural disasters to their own use?
Remember Cyclone Idai? How does that happen?
These are the results of people who went to school, schooled people, but people that were not educated.
Not long ago I wrote about Liverpool Football team’s pin-up player, Sadio Mane. He holds no degree(s). He thus missed the chance of being schooled. Thank God! But Sadio Mane is the one who builds a hospital for his people in Senegal. He is the one who builds a school in the dusty rustic plainness of his village. He is the one who builds orphanages to bring back sense and purpose in the lives of Senegalese children who lost parents to wars and diseases they neither caused nor understand.
People who went to school . . . to be told things in books most of them written by white men and women, or blacks who were contaminated by the philosophies of life and concepts of thinking found in the white men’s books, have not done anyone any good. Such schooled African doctors, professors and whatever kind of fundis they are . . . God forbid, have done nothing for someone else except for themselves or in circumstances that give them money.
When I was doing my own studies more than 40 years ago I used to think scholars like Illich were mentally deranged education reformists. They espoused the theory that school was dead and dangerous. School dead and dangerous? Yes, that is the thinking they espoused. I suddenly began to struggle with my own mind. Mandela said education was the only weapon with which we could drive away ignorance and poverty. Many others talked and still talk about how education is costly but how ignorance can be more costly. All these thinkers were and are very correct. How then could anybody in their right sense of mind think school is dead and dangerous?
But careful examination of the minds and thoughts of all these thinkers even in their direct intellectual contestations and variances in perception adjudges them all correct. You only need to be clear who was talking about education and about schooling; for the two are as different as chalk is from cheese.
If schools or universities produce executive thieves and criminals, heartless people, selfish individuals who have no conscience and morality (the sense of what is right or wrong), people who create more problems in life instead of being problem solvers . . . that kind of schooling is dead and dangerous. And I dare say this is what has kept Africa behind! The systems of education that is not home grown, and not fit for purpose. Education systems that are mischievous ploys to keep Africans silent, poor, divided and enemies of each other! It is these adopted education systems that make sure this happens. And it has taken ‘free’ Africa, with all its proud learned doctors and professors, decades running into a century, to genuinely break away the chains of slavery.
The racist colonialists who designed the systems of education Africans today sadly boast about from the Harvards, Oxfords and Cambridges of the world did it so well that the opium in the education acquired at these white universities continues to keep us drunk and clueless about when we will be genuinely free as a people. Free to paddle our own canoes the direction we want!
My story speaks about people who went to school to read words and nothing about the world, people who went to school but left the schools highly schooled, but without the education.
A country is better with a few Sadio Manes than with hundreds of thousands of intellectuals who in all their years of schooling missed the education, but were told about stories and facts full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
Africa will never change until Africans themselves stop drinking too much from the wrong cup of education served by white people in the many white universities that ensure that black fundis hate themselves, their blackness and their own people. Africa will never change, until every African who had the privilege of drinking from these oases of academic equilibrium realises schooling was not enough. Instead we needed to be educated, to learn how we could be useful to other people especially those in our communities and to learn to use our education to improve the lives of other people.
Who can help us change Africa? (Of course not the clandestine education systems for these are full of intellectual hypocrisy and mischief intended to brainwash and stupefy Africans). Who else, except ourselves? Bob Marley said none but ourselves shall free our minds from mental slavery. What mental slavery? That we went to school to be better off people than the rest . . . that we went to school to seek wealth and fame. . . to be a class of our own separate and detached from the poor and suffering!
That it was through our own intelligence and effort that we made it to the end of the rainbow and no one else saw us to our success! That it was their fault, those who did not go to school. We were smart . . . we were clever. . . we were favoured by God! If you did not go to school, do not blame those who did! That is the mental slavery. Typical mental slavery, influenced by the system of education we went through. God forgive us! God help us to realise why you chose us to go to school, and not those! Why you gave us positions and brilliant minds, and not those! Why you blessed us with different gifts and talents! Help us to realise that in all those differences in aptitudes, social and economic positions, we are one and in your divine love, you love us equally. No less than the trees and the stars, indeed we have the privilege to be here.
