Is What We're Doing Working?

Placed in a crowded dining room turned exam room—pen in hand, calculator and ruler on either side of a small uneven and antiquated desk—I, like many of my fellow students, hacked away at the  tough Mathematics paper.

Fighting to recollect formulae and a barrage of other mathematic solution roadmaps, I surrendered rather peacefully to the mental assault of this paper. As customary among many University students, I cowered under the old: “We didn’t learn this in class” euphemism. We were writing this paper around the same time Load-shedding was rearing its ugly head; which is an engineering problem and here we were writing Engineering Mathematics, some of Zambia’s brightest. And as epiphanies can be notoriously known for hitting you when you least desire them, I asked: “is what we are doing working?” and the secondary (notoriously existential) question: "what's the point?"

Now, discussing education can be as polarizing as discussing politics or religion. But to the merit of both politics and religion, discussions have been held, to what regard and relevancy, that is topic on its own, but education, at least in terms of reformation or restructuring has not seen a major debate or discussion.

Compulsory grade and age segregated schooling is only about 100 years old. Before that apprenticeship was the modus operandi of the people seeking knowledge. Our current model of education is largely borrowed from the British, who adopted and modified theirs from Germany, who adopted and modified theirs from the Prussian kingdom. Now, a few tweaks might have been made, but it’s still fundamentally the same. Running on the same premise. A premise that made the industrial age blossom, but one in which a digital age tittering on the fringes of overpopulation might soon implode.

What is this premise?

To create obedient, replaceable, competent workers.

Now, some might cringe with fright and put on their conspiracy glasses and misconstrue that premise. But for an industrial age that needed uninterrupted labor in abundance and had both the money and customer base to pay that labor well, it was a great deal…some might even call it Utopia. Jobs were plentiful, industries were booming, often on the heels of the various appetites of a population that was being exposed to the liberty of choice found in mass marketing and advertising—in television, newspapers and magazines. 

Then saturation hit—and Utopia was lost. Products outrun consumer consumption. Layoffs and downsizing became commonplace because companies couldn’t sustain their labor force anymore.

This is why the current model of the education system, especially in an emerging economy such as Zambia is not sustainable. Our country, Africa and the World are in need of peculiar problem solvers for the peculiar problems they have. We can no longer shy away from financial management, entrepreneurship, and leadership in school core curriculum and hope that development will be acquired through osmosis. We cannot afford to teach disciplines in science, economics, law etc, which are generic copy—and—paste models from other countries. Until we identify developmental areas we are lacking in, cater our educational system to that and encourage a diversification of not only academia but an incorporation and appreciation of things often viewed as inferior (especially in Zambia) that is Arts and Entertainment, which by any stretch is a multi-dollar industry and boasts one of the largest job markets in the world, we will always be known as the poor Copper producing Third-World country.

Can we start to reward risk and creativity? Embrace diversity and a hunger for individual expression? All these are ingredients of an innovative soul. Unabashed compliance breeds kids, and ultimately adults crippled by fear when it comes to trying something novel, something outside the script. Teaching kids it's okay to have a different answer, or no answer at all--or better yet to question the answer.  

Talents are gifts, genetically endowed (for the more scientifically inclined) or spiritually endowed (for the more religiously inclined) whether it’s being able to throw a ball, sing or solve mathematics, our youth need our understanding and nurturing.

Let’s quit this venality for schooling for schooling sake, for rushing to finish a curriculum when the people you teach don’t understand a single thing yet get good grades. For badgering students with incoherent, disconnected facts. For stacking Masters and PhDs to increase your opportunity to get a job and not your mastery of a field and innovating tendencies. Until we understand that knowledge unless being actively poured out in terms of meaningful application is nothing more than a shiny trophy made of cheap metal.