The ManicaPost
Morris Mtisi
The above question was The Patriot’s March 29 to April 4 front cover header. The supporting picture was sad food for thought. The picture background or setting was a typical city or town with urbanites busy doing this or that…the scene journalists are fond of describing as a ‘hive of activity and movement.’
One lady is seen busy…very busy, occupied on her sewing machine. The sad part is young graduates wearing their academic gowns and hats, playing a plastic ball on the pavement. Another graduate, seemingly lost in thought, is seated and enjoying a drink of opaque beer without a brand.
This whole picture was clearly intended to tell a story…a story to answer the header question, ‘Is Our Education (in Zimbabwe) Useless?’
I am an obsessed Literature specialist. I am addicted to practical criticism. Pictures and words mean worlds of this or that. My first observation was the article’s writer not interested in asking, ‘Is Our education useful?’ He prefers ‘useless’ to ‘useful’. The difference in the semantics of these two questions is the same, except the attitude of the questioner. It is easy to tell that the writer’s own answer to the question is ‘Yes, it is useless.’ It is clearly not an innocent straight question begging an answer. Otherwise we would not be smart literature students able to deduce accurate meaning from writers’ choices of words. The question is clearly not denotative in nature. It is connotative.
Back to the picture telling a story! The picture is asking several other questions without a word attached to it. Why do Zimbabweans waste time going to University if they are going to end up using their gowns as uniforms to play a plastic ball in the pavement? Do you have to go to Uni to find something meaningful to do for a living? The picture seems to be saying ‘No!’ Is it the universities that are wrong…the education system, or the something is wrong with the school-leavers’ minds? You then stretch the mind to other graduates not shown on the picture. Literature’s critical thinking allows you to go that far. Literature is the only learning area that allows you to read between the lines and see hidden layers of not only what things are, but what they may be or ought to be. The eyes of your brain are not limited. What could the other graduates be doing away from the opaque beer and plastic ball? That certainly becomes Pandora’s box. A perceptive, reflective, observant, imaginative and penetrating mind does not end at what the picture shows, but even what is hidden or silent.
The first obvious reaction in thought is, ‘Oh, what a visual sense of humour!’ Humour embedded in the picture? Really? Not if you look at the picture thoughtfully and deeply enough!
The picture is a sad, almost embarrassing exposure of how our education has gradually grown away from useful to useless. The Patriot observes (article written by Professor Sheunesu Mpepereki-page 2) how the general public expressed outrage failing to understand Professor Murwira’s ‘useless degrees’ emphasis on their lack of utility value. How the learned Prof smartly got away with it! He meant what he said but covered himself in shrewd defence on television. And of course only then did people ‘understand’ what he meant. You will all remember how in Animal Farm by George Orwell, the cleverer and more educated pigs got away with whatever they said when they were addressing the cognitively humbler animals. The ordinary animals always agreed with whoever was speaking at every other moment (between Napoleon and Snowball)-too simple or naive to make out whom was making sense or not. That is another story.
The Patriot carries this long ‘dissertation’ or academic discourse in erudite fashion showing how Education 3.0 was inadequate and how it needed value addition to be able to answer the maiden question, “Is Our Education Useless?” All authorities scholarly supported each other in advocating Education 5.0 in their familiar colourful terms oozing prodigious learnedness. They agreed this would answer the economic problems of the country, particularly unemployment for degreed Zimbabweans. How would it do it? By simply introducing aspects of industrialisation and innovativeness! They all agreed in their intellectual in-quietude that this meant an education system that was fit for purpose…a system that emphasised on creation of wealth through production of goods and services.
The progression from Education 3.0 whose hallmark of education was rote learning to Education 5.0 coming in with the dimensions of Innovation and Industrialisation which would turn knowledge into marketable goods and services is very sound and hard to contest. There is no doubt about that.
The import of this discourse is not to question the validity of moving from Education 3.0 to 5.0. This transformative initiative did not need robotic scientists to discover and reveal. We all knew the system of education was irrelevant and too bookish, useless may be, all this time. We all knew Zimbabweans mistook a high literacy for functional education, but those who spoke lacked voice, authority and power to change things. Now that we have voiceful people in the corridors of education, the Education 5.0 concept seems to be new. It is not. What we are delighted about is that now there are people and minds able to put wings on the machine and make it fly. We really hope so.
The new question is, “Who determines the uselessness or usefulness of education? When who says it is useful or useless do we then say it is? When education has moved from being a hallmark of rote learning (3.0) and adopted Innovation and Industrialisation (5.0) is that all it can stretch to? Is the usefulness of education only determined by how far it is economically fit for purpose? Is education useful only as far as it can create wealth through goods and services?
What about the moral code of the country? What with the vuzu parties trending amongst school-going youths!
Does Zimbabwe not mind how its citizens behave socially and culturally for example, so long as they can create goods and services and are able to create wealth for the country and for themselves? Does the essence of life end there?
Look at the behaviour of students in schools, colleges and universities! Nauseating student prostitution, the so-called vuzu parties publicly advocating public group sex, rampant alcohol and drug abuse and other forms of wayward behaviour! University students, most of them, lack depth of character and common sense needed to avoid celebrating moral decay. What kind of an education system are we advocating that omits moral rearmament? If it is not the job of Education to produce Zimbabweans that are morally fit, whose job is it? Is Education 5.0 all our education can offer to answer the call to fitness for purpose? Fitness for purpose! What purpose?
Does the arrest of 131 youths in the Bulawayo CBD for disruptive noise in the city, uttering obscene words and drinking alcohol expose an education that is useful? Does the abuse of drugs, smoking of mbanje and use of substances ending up in reckless unprotected sex not expose a society that has gone to the dogs? If education produces vuzu youths, is it a useful education? Where are the wheels coming off?
If the answer is, “Our education is useful’, how come those who have not gone to school behave more like human beings in their ignorance and un-learnedness? And the learned, or at least the allegedly learned, behave not only like beasts, but beasts of the wild? If going to school produces animals and not going to school keeps youths sane and human, how does society deal with such reversal of values?
If the vuzu imbeciles were illiterates…non-schooled youths, psychologists would now begin to advocate free and compulsory education for them to mitigate animal behaviour…in a way they have already done so. But now that it is schools producing purposeless self-destroying youths, what do they say? Where is the usefulness of the education? Who can be proud that they sent their child to school…their child who is busy slowly committing suicide and as long as they are alive, opt to live like wild, raucous animals?
