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Exam results and the new curriculum irony

13 Dec, 2019 - 00:12 0 Views

The ManicaPost

Straight Talk  Morris Mtisi
Grade 7 results first: The usual media furore goes into full gear. The frenzy is not escapable. This is news.

The newsmen and women are at it again all over the radio and newspapers. National percentage pass rate is published (46,9 percent) as the “hit parade” collocation begins.

Chancellor Junior School shocks everyone. It tumbled from the usual number one spot. Mutare Junior did very well. It was at number three. John Cowie sat at number one.

It was followed by Baring Primary School. New to taste top positions were Dangamvura Primary and St Joseph’s Primary schools. Names of pin-up teachers are listed. They are excellent teachers.

“How did the ‘top schools’ fall from grace and eat humble pie? How did ‘nonentities’ dine with the kings in this supper called examinations?”

Chancellor, beaten by John Cowie and St Joseph’s? Chinekewo! These are the questions people ask, particularly parents, most of them crying louder than the bereaved. I will carefully and graphically straight talk about this change of the complexion of examination results next week. Watch this   space!

This week’s issue is another one. When everything has been felt, said and done what do the attitudes of everyone, including the media, mean, vis-a-vis the purpose and agenda of the new curriculum? Do people understand the thrust of the new curriculum?

When examinations glorify only the academically gifted. . . . when school heads run to the newspapers to display only academic kings and queens . . . and the media picks up the academic trumpet and blows it above and over the hills and far away for the schools, is that in the spirit of the new curriculum? Certainly not!

People every day talk about competence- based learning; meaning those with gifts and talents other than academic are equally important.

What happens to the fastest athlete in the school, the best rugby player, soccer and netball player, hockey player, tennis player? What happens to the best debater and public speaker?

All these and more are not the best and will never appear in the newspaper except by chance or mistake. Meanwhile, the top academic achievers are those with five units at Grade 7, a chain of As at ‘O’ Level and 15 pointers at “A” Level. Where are the rest?

Our education system has adopted the new curriculum. Its authors or protagonists defined the aim and purpose clearly. They speak eloquently and big about what it means and what it does not mean. But none of them does what they say.

Everybody seems to be still ironically stuck in the past where academic excellence was the only way to go . . .where the learning was not competence based . . . where learners were told things by teachers and books and crammed all of it to reproduce in examinations. If you carefully examine the way exams treat learners . . . and how society makes a fuss about academic achievement, you know or can tell how they do not understand their own curriculum.

I want to challenge everybody and anybody on the interpretation of the new curriculum. The system and all who claim to be implementers of this great idea . . .  call them drivers of the curriculum, are busy indicating right, and when they get to the bend, they turn left. What kind of drivers are these?

Everyone still believes when learners scoop distinctions, it is the work of one teacher found at the end of the conveyor belt. Strange, isn’t it? Teachers who are serious and know what teaching is and what is involved will know they cannot be alone in it.

It is the effort of everyone else that makes learning easy and fluid.

The basis of the allotment of merit awards in the schools therefore is null and void . . . meaningless if you like. And the idea itself (of merit awards) is old fashioned and a direct breach of the spirit of Education 5.0. Schools end up competing instead of complementing each other. The same with teachers at one school! They compete instead of complementing each other and respecting one another for a collective victory. The examinations results system and how everyone sees the academic achievers alone, is as confused as it is unjust.

The new curriculum is intended to take learners to their various bests. It seeks to make every single learner realise his or her best by a purposeful development of special competences.

It does a lot of things to prepare learners who are fit for purpose and able to create their own jobs and their own wealth.

One thing it does not do is to encourage the majority of learners to escort the academically gifted who are the minority, to their destinies. Our system of education plainly uses the academically gifted to measure their intellectual superiority by pushing those with diverse competences, skills, gifts and talents to the back burner. I love the new curriculum because it seeks to bring this tendency to an end.

But until we all understand what the new curriculum seeks to address and offer for learners, we are at the risk of celebrating a scientific invention we do not understand. . . an invention that will eventually kill us instead of save us.

It was Shakespeare who wrote about extreme ambition that made a horse rider jump too high, only to fall over the other side instead of on the saddle! What does this mean?

Sometimes we try too much and in the anxious confusion and ambition jump too high and fall over the edge.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT!

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