A Decade Silently Pondering Africa’s Educational Dilemma

Not long ago I became acquainted with the fact that one of Western Philosophy’s greatest thinkers, Immanuel Kant, spent an entire decade not publishing a single thing before he came out with his seminal work, The Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, whose revolutionary ideas literally changed the course of western philosophy.

This fact gave me great comfort because if Kant needed an entire decade to think about this most complex of topics, how much more do I need to think about a topic as complex as: “What is our Education for?”

This is a problem that has plagued me for almost a decade, and over that time I have arrived at the tentative conclusion that education is meant to support the full development of an individual into the person that they can be; in other words, allow them to explore their full potential and unique gifts, so that they can be fully expressed and thereby make their unique contribution to the world. I explore this idea a little more in an interview that I gave in 2020.

I am sure we might debate this conclusion of mine but to date it is the purpose that resonates the best with me, and that seems to be agreed upon by many thinkers pondering the same question, especially with regard to life in the 21st century and beyond.

Having tentatively established the WHY of the education system as I envisage it, however, I was still faced with two further practical questions:

1. How would such an education look like, especially in the African Context?
2. How can we transform our current education systems to allow for such an education (& can our education systems be thus transformed)?

The quest began soon after I obtained my PhD in Education, the sum of which was concerned with understanding what the scores in national examinations in Uganda really tell us about a student’s preparedness for university (full thesis can be found here).

In the middle of pondering my next move I came across Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed“, where the author put into words some of the inconsistencies I had been observing in our education system. He introduces the concept of “Banking” in the prevailing education systems of the 1930s, in which the students were viewed as containers into which an educator poured knowledge, to be retrieved later during the examinations, akin to the process of banking money. In his view this robbed an individual of the opportunity to critically reflect on their own condition in the world, become aware of the oppressive conditions in which they lived, and participate in liberating themselves, a pedagogy which he termed as a “Critical Pedagogy”.

Even though Paolo Freire wrote this book in the 1930s, it accurately portrayed what what I was observing all around me, and set me on the path to try and think about what an education that liberates might look like (I wrote about some of my initial thoughts here). What I observe is that this banking education system truly incapacitates and prevents us from correctly analysing our reality, and so we fail to build a basis upon which to develop the correct solutions. What the banking education does, instead, is create the habit of looking to someone else to describe what the problem is (as out teachers did) and then present us with a fully formed solution (again, as out teachers did). Or, because a lot of what is banked during our schooling years is information about how problems were solved in other places (How the Dutch reclaimed land from the Sea or how the Tennessee Valley Authority solved the problems of soil erosion in the South Eastern United States in 1933! – both topics in S.2 Geography) – priming us to look beyond our context to see how similar problems have been solved, and then import those solutions; many times unsustainable, ill-fitting solutions.

I am still reading Freire, but along the way I became curious about what our education systems looked like before the “oppressor” set their own system in place.

… the purpose of African education was well defined, with functionalism as its major guiding principle – functionalism for self-sufficiency rather than functionalism for colonial labour. In this context, African society regarded education as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. This explains why education was a lifelong endeavour, fully integrated into the major institutional structures and making it applicable and relevant to the needs of society from one generation to the next.

Mungazi and Walker (1997, p. 38)

What’s more, traditional education progressed by through discovery and observation of nature, learning methods from which we can learn; although it must also be said that it also had its shortcomings, such as harmful superstitions, and the subordinate place of women in society (Woolman, 2001).

Contrast this education policy in British Africa, which was aimed at

“Training to meet the everyday lives of native life, to correct present glaring deficiencies and to strengthen and develop the good points” (Jones, 1925, cited in Mukoboto, 1978, p. 2).

Existing traditional education structures were believed to be “immoral and dangerous, and to be avoided at all costs” (Mukoboto, 1978, p. 16). In the words of one of the policy advisors at the time:

“Since the African child cannot learn habits of cleanliness and order and notions of morals and religion in his own home, he should learn them at school” (Dubois, 1929, cited in Mukoboto, 1978, p. 26).

Nowhere, however, have I seen recorded the sinister motives of the colonisers more explicitly than in this excerpt by the spokesman of the Rhodesia Front Party in 1969:

We in the Rhodesia Front Government are determined to control the rate of African political advancement till time and education make it a safe possibility. Besides, we wish to retain the power to retard the advancement of the Africans through education to make sure that the government remains in responsible [white] hands (emphasis not in original).

Andrew Skeen (cited in Mungazi & Walker, 1997, p. 37

Note: The Rhodesia Front Party ruled Zimbabwe from 1962 to 1979

If we fail to do the work necessary to determine our own purpose of the education that we offer our children today, then we necessarily perpetuate the intentions of our former (or shall we say current) colonisers to keep us mentally colonised – as one great African American Historian & Educator, Carter G. Woodson has said:

“When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary”

Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro

Which brings me to my current endeavour:

I would like, next, to read the Mis-Education of the Negro and share a synopsis for those who do not have the time to read the 237-page volume, but in addition I am currently reading & summarising the following additional books:

1. The Ignorant Schoolmaster by the French Philosopher Jacques Rancière..
2. Decolonising the Mind by the Kenyan writer & academic Ngũgĩ, wa Thiongo.

After which I hope I can also tackle:

1. The African Origin of Civilisation by Senegalese Historian and Anthropologist Cheikh Anta Diop
2. Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey by the Jamaican Political Activist Marcus Garvey.

I am also currently reading The Wretched of the Earth by the French West Indian psychiatrist and political activist Frantz Fanon, but honestly I am struggling to comprehend the book… But I will carry on, anyway.

My quest, in all this, is to see if I can develop a clear understanding of what precisely is wrong with our education systems, and how they need to change in order to serve us better. If you know of any other books I can read to help me apprehend the full picture then please share!

For now, the silent decade continues.

P.S. I also explore this question with other African Scholars & Thought leaders through a podcast that I launched earlier his year: “A is not for Apple”

Three random stories & some deep thinking about our education system

During the COVID19 lockdown in Uganda I discovered my love for fene – or jackfruit. This is a fruit that I had always loathed because it was smelly, too sweet, & full of sap! Why did people even eat it? This was until a 12-year-old offered me some semi-ripe fene one idle lockdown day, & instead of swatting him away as I normally would have I thought – enh, why not try? And. it. was. a. revelation! You see, semi-ripe fene is much less smelly, just sweet enough, & if someone else deals with the sap & bring you the prepared fruit a total delight

From then on I could not go a day without some fene. I had read somewhere that the seeds were medicinal so I saved them all & soon was running out of containers to store them. Once again I found myself running into my own ignorance – what does one do with fene seeds? Roast them? Boil them?

Eventually I asked my fene supplier & she too did not know what one did with fene seeds. AS a child, she said, they simply threw them away, but she had also heard somewhere that some children roasted and ate them – but just for fun, really.

Speaking of my fene woman, somewhere in the middle of 2021 she disappeared for about 3 months & I had to scramble here & there to get my fix, and then she suddenly reappeared at her stall with a 5 week-old baby! I had not even known she had been pregnant – “what gives”, I asked her “how come I did not know you were pregnant?” To which she replied: “I was very careful to hide my pregnancy – you know how it is!” This I found puzzling. She is a grown woman with two more children that I knew of, and being pregnant was not forbidden to market women, so why would she hide her pregnancy? Not feeling able to ask her directly I later asked my Mom & she told me that traditionally women hid their pregnancies, and later their new-borns from the public for fear of being the target of “the evil eye”. Women believed that either out of jealousy or simple ill-will other people, primarily other women, might plot to harm them or the child, & so they made sure the child was safely born & firm before going about openly with them.

Thinking about this I thought that perhaps the high maternal & child mortality rates of the past had made women extra cautious around being pregnant & having children, and this belief might have inadvertently forced women to take more care in the last few months of pregnancy as well as the first few weeks of a baby’s life, which might, in turn, have been their way of increasing the child’s chances of survival – whether this made any difference or not is another matter, but one could understand such a practice surviving. In the absence of scientific or logical explanations the threat of some person throwing evil at you or your child did the job.

As I was pondering the evil eye another story reached me about a young handsome man about town, who is such a big womanizer that he shows up to hangs with his friends with a different woman on his arm, and sometimes his wedded wife, until some of his friends have just said they don’t want to know! Throughout high school this young man, who is also pretty loaded, was often being lusted after or hotly pursued by dozens of girls at a time, and so I suppose he has always had it easy with girls. No one could believe it when one of those girls agreed to marry him and have his babies.

Anyway: somewhere in lockdown this young man had apparently discovered that his wife had cheated on him, and apparently this threw him for a complete loop! He reportedly did not sleep properly for 6 whole months, dragged his wife over to confess her sins to her lover’s wife, and all in all ran mad!! He is now to be found looking rather unkempt, has taken up vaping, and has become extremely humbled by these events. He & his wife have decided to put this incident behind them & work on their marriage, but obviously for me I can’t understand why he thought it was OK for him to cheat on his wife all over town but CANNOT take his wife straying just this once.

I turned to my mother again to ask her how this double standard has come about. In narrating the story to her, though, I found that I did not know the Runyankole word for “cheating”, and so I asked her what it was. She said that actually, in the Kihima culture there was no word for cheating because both men and women were allowed to sleep with other men and women just as long as these were confined to either the man’s brothers and close friends, or the woman’s sisters and close friends. If someone strayed beyond this circle, then this was considered extremely reprehensible behavior. An anathema. Totally immoral!

And why? My mother did not explain but I ventured an explanation by myself. I suppose the Bahima accepted the fact that just like eating and breathing, sex was a human appetite, and that naturally one might want some variety. Perhaps this accommodation was also possible considering that children belonged to a clan and not to just the one man, and so if one’s wife bore one’s brother’s child it would still be considered their child. No wonder if one’s husband died one of the brothers was expected to take over the widow.

All this to say they worked it out, and no jealousy ensued. Everyone was (supposedly) happy.

Checking with a Muganda friend of mine, however, it turned out that having sex with a man or a woman who was not one’s spouse was straight away considered immoral, but was only grounds for divorce if it was the woman who was caught in the act. But even then the pre-marital rights discretely allowed for a little something on the side, because both the groom & bride to be were advised never to ask their spouse questions like: “where are you coming from” or “what did you do today?” were you today?”. Extramarital relations operated under a don’t ask don’t tell policy.  

In the middle of all this mix I came across a book edited by Mwalimu J. Shujaa and titled: Too Much Schooling, Too Little Education: A paradox of black life in white societies, in which a conceptual distinction is made between schooling and education as follows:

Schooling seeks to transfer the core (facts) knowledge of the [dominant] culture to students so they will share a common background, basic vocabulary, skills, history, etc., and will enable them to negotiate with/within “the system.”

Education, on the other hand, involves learning that transmits the cultural uniqueness of non-dominant groups to the next generation

In this book the authors ask: why is it, that to be educated means to take on this middle class white culture that is institutionalized in the schooling system? Who decided that this was the culture to which everyone should aspire? Is it that it is the most “advanced” culture? No. Simply the dominant one. And in some way to survive in the jungle one has to learn the law of the jungle. However, this then relegates all other knowledge, experience, wisdom, and history to the rubbish heap of time. Shujaa & co. make reference to hip-hop culture, for instance, and observe that while this is a culture that has arisen in response to the black American experience, the values and practices ingrained within it are still considered inferior, and young people have the choice wither to remain “behind” and accept to be labelled as failures, or “escape” and be considered as successful.

Reading this brought our own educational situation to mind.

The vast majority of the Ugandan population has received both a “schooling” and an “education”, but only the “schooling” is considered to be of value, and tragically is equated with being educated! As a so-called educated person going around on the streets of Kampala or interacting with the residents of the small towns and villages dotted across the country, I find myself continuously at odds with these highly educated but under-schooled men, women and children, because although we both inhabit the same physical space, we live in two quite different social and cultural realities. It is true that as a result of my schooling I am able to access the higher rungs of the economic ladder a little easier than they, I often feel that they live a much more socially and culturally grounded life.

The question, that I ask us all, then, is: how can we see to it that we are not only schooled but educated as well? How can we access the “facts” about our cultural, social, and historical reality? I believe that part of the reason we continue in a cycle of conflict, bad governance, and disease is that the schooled but uneducated people in charge of our nations are continually mis-diagnosing our problems, (or swallowing, wholesale, the mis-diagnoses carried out by outsiders), and then arriving at (or adapting and adopting) mis-fitting solutions.

A very good example is this TEDWomen Talk given by a Zimbabwean friend of mine, Francisca Mutapi, about the many mis-fitting solutions perpetuated by the “global health” community for the African continent, for instance in the case of the ongoing COVID19 “pandemic”, and urging us to trust ourselves more when it comes to understanding our own conditions.

Global health experts in the West predicted that Africa was going to suffer heavily because of COVID-19-related. Those predictions have not come true. In this 5-minute TEDWomen talk, Francisca Mutapi explains why.

It is time we challenged ourselves to look soberly at the intentions at the root of our current education systems, and be bold enough to take back control of our own education!

A History of Educational Reform in Sub-Saharan Africa

Having explored the roots of the word Education, and then briefly laid out the history of education systems in formerly colonised countries like Uganda (as well as their legacy), we would now like to take a closer look at the attempts that our countries have made to reform the education system since Independence times.

The 1960’s, 1970’s, & 1980’s

Just as with a lot of colonial structures, many African nations were eager to “Africanise” the education system as soon as they gained independence. The Nigerian Scholar Pai Obanya has characterised these efforts as ranging from Radical Revolutionary,  where countries went so far as to as change the language of instruction and craft entire new visions for their education systems (Tanzania is a good example), through to the more Realistic Revolutionary approaches, where countries preferred not to re-invent the wheel, but chose instead to keep the beneficial aspects, and at the same time explore additional avenues to respond to specific contextual needs, such as how to cater for “non-intellectual talents” (e.g. Zimbabwe).

Others, yet, took a more Evolutionary approach; although these countries acknowledged some of the inadequacies of the colonial system, they did not seek to engineer the system to any great extent, and preferred instead to allow the changes to take their natural course. In some cases, in fact, these countries even mirrored changes in the systems of their former colonial powers; for instance, changes in the French Higher Education system brought on by student riots in the late 1960s were implemented in some parts of French-speaking Africa with little or no modification.

The last category of reforms followed a more Ad hoc approach; according to Pai Obanya:

“This is the type of educational reform that tends to address just one issue at a time, without an organic link with related problems, and often without carrying all possible stake-holders along with the reform process. A very good example of an ad hoc approach is one in which new education policies are announced or decreed to the population without due study, analysis or consultation”

This turns out to be quite a common approach to educational reform even in more recent times. Pai Obanya gives an example of this ad hoc approach from his homeland of Nigeria, which “changed the school year from January-December to September-June in 1973, returned swiftly to the old system in 1983, and changed back to the 1973 ‘innovation’ in 1985” (see full article here).

The  1990’s and 2000’s

Building on the first 30 years of educational reform in Africa, the last 30 years, then, have been marked by three new forces:

1. A desire to correct some of the inefficiencies in the resultant systems, such as high student drop-out rates and low basic skills acquisition;
2. A need to respond to a trend towards a global knowledge society, where acquiring skills has become more important than acquiring knowledge.
3. In Africa’s particular case, additional pressures imposed by the need to meet the targets of global development agendas (such as the Millennium and the subsequent Sustainable Development Goals), and the parallel over-reliance on foreign aid to finance educational reform

Whether in direct response to these forces or not, educational reform in Africa over the last 30 years has been, in any case, dominated by two gradual shifts: from teacher-centred to learner-centred approaches; and the accompanying outcomes-based education, which shifts the focus from what the teacher does and the content that has to be covered, to what the learner is able to do at the end of the educational experience, no matter what process or content comes before.

Learner-Centred Approaches

Although they have gained a lot of prominence in the last few decades, learner-centred approaches have been in existence for almost 100 years. First proposed by the Educational Theorist Jean Piaget in the 1920s, they can also be seen in the educational philosophies advanced by John Dewey (1938), and Lev Vygotsky (1978).

This way of thinking about learning was a break from the earlier behaviorist approaches, by which learning was associated with observable learner behavior. This view, however, took no account of the internal activity of the child’s mind. Learner-centred approaches, on the other hand, acknowledged the way the mind works, and are guided by the following tenets: 

• knowledge is not transmitted, but is constructed in the mind of the learner. Learning is a mentally active process, and learning results from personal interpretation of knowledge;

• learning is a process in which meaning is developed on the basis of prior knowledge and experiences, and are in turn determined by culture and social context;

• language influences culture and thinking, and is central to learning and the development of higher cognitive processes.

This understanding of the learning process then has a direct impact on the way learning occurs, and redefines the relationship between teacher and student. This understanding, for that matter, is also behind the current efforts by many African governments to promote local language instruction in the first few years of primary school education.

A common critique of learner-centred approaches, however, is that while they are quite clear on what these approaches are, they are less clear on how to facilitate this kind of learning. This has resulted in some problems with its implementation as a vehicle of educational reform, and we will explore this further in a future post.

Outcomes-Based Education

While learner-centred approaches are concerned with the learning process, outcomes-based education is concerned with the assessment of this learning.

Outcomes-based education demands an answer to: what does the child know, and what can they do?

Primarily, then, outcomes-based education provides a framework by which to measure the extent to which a learner can apply knowledge in a specific context; that the skills acquired in school are developed into clear predefined competencies, and that certain attitudes and values are acquired in the process of schooling that harmonise with those of society and the workplace.

To this end, then, outcomes-based education is less concerned about what is taught or how it is taught, and more with demonstrating that the learner has mastered a set of defined competencies. These might include things like managing one-self, relating with others, oral and written communication, problem solving and the ability to apply the appropriate knowledge to the appropriate situations.

Global Development Agreements and Foreign Aid

Besides the global forces shaping educational reform worldwide, Africa is particularly influenced by the requirement to meet externally determined targets, which are often tied more broadly to the funding available for educational reform. In the early 1990s, for instance, there was a race to meet the targets of the World Declaration on Education For All (Jomtien,1990), which was followed by the Dakar Accord and Millennium Development Goals (2000) – both of which were specifically aimed at improving education outcomes in the developing world. The current 2030 Sustainable Development Goals are more global in nature, but since they take account of the fall in quality that the earlier focus on quantity resulted in, they still disproportionately tie the hands of  African governments that rely on foreign aid.

Beyond these global agreements, our over-reliance on foreign aid by itself also makes us especially vulnerable to foreign interests. Take the example of Tanzania, which, since independence, had made strides to progressively institute Swahili as the dominant language of instruction through to university level. In 1987, however, an English language teaching support project was introduced as a component of British development aid:

“One condition for this project, laid down by the Overseas Development Agency (ODA) of the British government….was that the Ministry of Education should ensure that English remains the medium of instruction for secondary schools, a condition which the Tanzanian government accepted” 

In many other cases educational reform is led by foreign consultants, which, coupled with limited local stakeholder engagement, has sometimes resulted in ill-fitting solutions,  which ignore local needs, contexts, and developments. 

Looking Forward

This look back at the 60 years of educational reform in Africa since the independence era began has been in an effort to understand the processes that have brought us to where we are, and perhaps give some hints on how to go forward.

With that said, this longer and broader view on educational reforms in Africa still masks important details, and it may be instructive to zoom in and take a closer look at the specifics of the educational system that has resulted from these reforms.

In the next post, then, we discuss two case studies that help us elaborate and enumerate the specific issues that these 60 years of reform have bequeathed us. The first, Kenya, which instituted these learner-centred and outcomes based reforms starting 2017, and the second, Uganda, which has been at this a while too, but that has launched their latest changes in lower-secondary school education starting 2020.

 

Education Today

In the previous post we looked back at the roots of the education system that we have inherited in formerly colonised nations like Uganda. In this post we will explore the legacy of these roots.

Education Today

Given that this colonial education was utterly divorced from the daily life of the African, it by necessity had to proceed by what the Brazilian Philosopher Paulo Freire refers to as the “banking system of education”. In order for the educated African to provide the needed labour in the colonial machinery, s/he had to be initiated into the ways of the coloniser: their history, geography, religion, language, laws and economic systems. Seeing as it was not possible for these African schoolchildren to experience any of these first hand, it was necessary to pass it on in the abstract, and a by-product of this was to make the teacher all-knowing and all-powerful, as s/he held the key to knowledge, and also had the power to validate the knowledge that the student had acquired by awarding the grades and the certificates (which in turn gave one access to a good job).

Our current education system, as a result, presents the biggest obstacle to transforming our own society. The banking system of education produces people with a limited  exposure to, and understanding of their immediate environment; what’s more, because we receive knowledge in full we never learn to find it ourselves; because we are presented with the wording of the problem and the precise procedure by which to solve that problem, we never learn how to identify and describe our own problems, let alone craft the appropriate solutions to those problems.

It is no wonder, then, that when we leave school our gaze continues to be trained on the world beyond us to adopt “best practices” – “see what Singapore and South Korea have done” our decision makers say; “Even the Europeans do it like this” (so it must be good and right) they continue. In the meantime we are blind to all the ways in which these imported “solutions” fail to serve us, but are quick to judge “African solutions” as backward or inferior. In effect our education system continues to produce spectators, commentators, and imitators, rather than people able to reflect, engage, and act.

What way out?

The Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima has put it very well:

“To move forward, you must reclaim the past. In the past, you find the future and understand the present”. In order to make sense of our current education dilemma, it may be instructive to examine the roots of the present education system.

Since Independence, many African scholars have offered the rediscovery of our cultural roots as a panacea. Some were quite radical, such Unwuachi who favoured a complete departure from the colonial systems since “black cultural objectives can never be obtained using … white European standardised educational processes” Others, like Mazrui, thought that sacrificing the benefits of scientific and technological revolution by completely returning to traditional values would be impractical. Taking a similar middle ground, other scholars grant that traditional education offers useful learning methods, such as learning through discovery and observation of nature, but that it also had its shortcomings, such as harmful superstitions, and the diminished place of women in society.

At any rate, “African culture” is not a static point somewhere in the past. It is not possible to find “the Education that Africa lost [so that it can be] resuscitated for genuine development of the mind and soul of the continent”, as the African Ministers of Education once hoped. That said, a form of the African traditional education has been preserved among the uneducated, and provides a way for their own socialisation into their societies. As the African Ministers of Education have noted:

The WANANCHI (the ordinary people) have been the custodians of African culture in the true sense of the term. In many parts of Africa, a large majority of the ‘wananchi’ is still considered ‘uneducated’. This is due to one great paradox that has characterised education in the continent, where those who live the culture but who have not been to school, are considered ‘uneducated’, while those who have been through school but who do … not necessarily possess the culture of the people, are considered ‘educated’. In societies in which education has not lost touch with acculturation, to be educated is also to be cultured.

The current education system, therefore, has produced “three nations, each unable to communicate effectively with the others… the educated, [the uneducated], and the “half educate”, who neither understand the ways of their own indigenous societies, nor those of the highly educated’ These three nations continue to exist side-by-side in African society today, and they all have to be taken into account in figuring out how to transform our societies.

In the next post I explore the various efforts at reform that have been attempted across Africa and within Uganda since Independence, right up to our response to COVID-19.

Whence Came this Education System of Ours?

Looking around Uganda in 2020 it is difficult to imagine that only 120 years ago there were no schools, no teachers, and no curriculum. That is NOT to say, however, that there wasn’t any education! In this post we will take a look at education before the time of “formal schooling”, through the introduction of formal schooling in the colonial era, and then move on to what this has meant for the education system as we know it today.

Education in Pre-colonial Africa

Education in many parts of Africa was considered a concern of the entire society. In the early years, children underwent an informal education simply by observing and being instructed by parents, extended family and other community members. During this time they learnt about their environment and picked up proverbs by which to direct their lives, and also progressively gained age-appropriate skills as they helped out at home. As they entered adolescence, many African societies had elaborate initiation and coming of age ceremonies, through which the community’s values and accumulated knowledge and skills were passed on to the young people. In this mix of formal and informal education, the young people integrated into their communities and took up their place as productive adults.

A fundamental characteristic of these pre-colonial systems is that they took a global perspective. Apart from the training necessary for specific trades such as iron working, education was not understood as a set of specialisations. No wonder former Kenyan President, Jomo Kenyatta, described Gikuyu education as

…. a “wholehearted, purposeful activity proceeding in a social environment … knowledge thus acquired is related to a practical need, and … is merged into activity and can be recalled when that activity is again required. Behaviour is also learned from doing things together, and is therefore directed to social activities from the outset.

All in all, the outcome of this education was a sense of identity, belonging, and accomplishment.

The late Nigerian Scholar and former Minister of Education Aliu Fafunwa notes: ”In old Africa, … the man who combined good character with a specific skill was adjudged to be a well-educated and well integrated citizen of his community:

“The warrior, the hunter, the medicine man, the priest, the farmer, the nobleman, the man of character who combined and embraced the features of knowledge in its comprehensive form with specific skills, on the variety of which society benefited, was properly an educated person

Education for All

Finally, education in the African context was guided by the need for self-sufficiency, and integrated into all the family and community structures as it was available to all children. In this context education was as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself., and was therefore a lifelong endeavour,

Fast forward to the present, and the notion of Education for all has us all stumped! At the African Union meeting of Ministers of Education in 2005 they observed that “with colonialisation, Education became equated with mere schooling. In traditional societies, Education for All was taken for granted; in a colonial setting, Schooling for All became a problem”

Education in Colonial Africa

The roots of the education systems found on most of the African continent can be traced back to the coming of Christian missionaries from Britain, France and Portugal in the 1880s. Early on, the churches in British Africa were at the forefront of setting up schools, but 1919 the British decided to take more of an interest in running the education system, and set up the Phelps-Stokes Commission to assess the state of education in British Africa and advise on an education policy.

The Commission’s main recommendations consisted of following a strategy of “adaptation”, defined by one member of the Commission as: “Training to meet the everyday lives of native life, to correct present glaring deficiencies and to strengthen and develop the good points” This was meant to replace existing traditional education structures, which were believed to be “immoral and dangerous, and to be avoided at all costs”

In the words of one of the members of the Commission: “Since the African child cannot learn habits of cleanliness and order and notions of morals and religion in his own home, he should learn them at school”

Fast forward to independence, the education system had matured into an efficient system largely to produce low-level clerical staff to feed the colonial machinery. It should be understood that it was meant to produce well-behaved individuals who did not question authority, and certainly did not question the system. On the contrary, those who conformed best to this system were rewarded with the title of “educated”, and given government jobs.

For their part, the colonialists actively and consciously used the education system to maintain the status quo. Consider the words of Andrew Skeen, spokesman of the ruling Rhodesia Front party that ruled Zimbabwe from 1962 to 1979:

“We in the Rhodesia Front Government are determined to control the rate of African Political advancement till time and education make it a safe possibility. Besides, we wish to retain the power to retard the advancement of the Africans through education to make sure that the government remains in responsible [white] hands

The Legacy of Colonial Education

The late Tanzanian Scholar Ali Mazrui observes that many educated Africans are unaware that they are “… in cultural bondage. All educated Africans … are still cultural captives of the West” This, he says, has bred among the educated, and even the uneducated, a kind of “African self-contempt”.

By unquestioningly holding on to an education system that is rooted in the alienation of Africans from their social and cultural reality, we inadvertently perpetuate a system that exploits the peasant masses in service to the selfish interests of the elite. The elite, culturally colonised as we are, in turn serve the interests of the super powers upon whom Africa continues to depend. Realities like the rural-urban divide, an artefact of the colonial system, echo the economic exploitation under colonialism; the continued marginalisation of African languages reinforces the superiority of foreign languages; and the paucity of content about African history and geography in the curricula deepen the alienation from our own culture and traditions.

It is in these circumstances that we find it normal that “the educated African [becomes] a misfit … in his own village”, and is expected to leave his village when he graduates; “his parents [do not] expect him to continue living with them, tending the cattle or cultivating the land” – Mazrui.

In the next post I will look at some of the longer-lasting effects of this (in)auspicious start, and look at what this means for us going forward.

Getting to the Roots of the Word “Education”

We might as well start at the beginning. What is this whole thing that we call “Education” – especially today?

The word Education has two Latin roots: Educere & Educare:

Educere means to draw out, to lead forth

Educare means to nourish, to bring up

These two roots, and therefore the understandings of the word “Education” are at the root of the divide between those who think education is all about doing something to/for the student (i.e. someone has to draw the thing that is inside of the student out), or if it is something the student does themselves (in the right nourishing environment – like a plant). The battle, one might say, between teaching and learning, who is responsible for that teaching or learning, and how both happen.

The scholar who converted me to the idea that throughout our schooling in fact we learn, rather than that we are taught, per se, is  the French Philosopher Jacques Rancière, in his book: The Ignorant Schoolmaster (a web search should deliver a PDF). It tells of a well-regarded French-speaking Professor, Joseph Jacotot who finds his courses in high demand by some Flemish speaking local students, but having no way to “teach” them since he knew no Flemish. Their conundrum was solved when Jacotot chanced upon a bilingual magazine, which he then instructed the Flemish speaking students to use to learn French by comparing the translations in this magazine.

To his amazement, after some months of somehow teaching themselves French they were able to write essays about on the academic texts he assigned them in French, and quite respectable French too. He had expected ” horrendous barbarisms” but instead the students, without any explanations made about this language that many would agree is fairly complicated, had managed to “understand and resolve the difficulties of the language” on their own.

In brief, Rancière brings the whole notion of  “Schooling”, in which the teacher knows and the student does not, and in which the teacher therefore has to explain things to the student in order for her or him to understand, into question. It also brings into question the fact that everything that the student has to learn can be precisely and conclusively laid out in a curriculum, in a specific order, so that the student can avoid wasting time on non-essential knowledge or trying to learn things in the wrong order. He had not, after all, had to explain French grammar or conjugation to these Flemish speakers; he had not guided them on what to learn first and what to learn next; they had not passed a series of tests along the way; no. Instead, they appear only to have been driven by their own will, and in the end by necessity. Was it possible, then, that we were all capable of learning anything if only we were compelled  by circumstances to learn?

He gives the example of the way in which children the world over learn their mother tongue; from Chinese to Lugbara to Silbo (one of a handful of whistling languages that are still in use), no one has to explain anything – they hear, they imitate, they make mistakes and self-correct, and they learn. As soon as they enter school, however, this ability to learn is suddenly assumed to vanish, and now everything has to be explained to them and they should learn by filling in the missing … and whatnot. Looking at all this Rancière arrives at a startling realisation:

The idea of Schooling is based on the assumption that the students are incapable of understanding without someone else explaining things to them – the belief that this incapacity exists sustains the practice of explaining things, even when there is no proof that this incapacity exists.  As soon as it becomes clear that a child can in fact learn even without a teacher to explain things to them the explainer realises that they are not as central to the learning process as they thought. At that moment it becomes clear that it is in fact the explainer who needs the incapable for him or her to exist; the incapable does not always need the explainer.

Looking back on my own schooling, and perhaps readers will relate, it occurred to me that most of what I learnt I learnt on my own. Or rather, that even though a teacher may have introduced and explained certain concepts to me, learning only took place when I engaged my own mind and will to learn what s/he was trying to teach. If that teacher had not been there, and given that I had access to the books containing that information, the only necessary ingredient to my learning would have been my own will to put in the time to learn. This is NOT to say that the teacher is not necessary – they still have a role to play in facilitating or organising the learning; it is only to say that s/he is not as central to learning as they have come to be thought to be.

While we are on the subject, can we say that those who have never been in a school are really “uneducated”? After all they run successful businesses and can spot a good deal a lot better than the so-called educated. And what about those who dropped out of school but went on to teach themselves new skills, including supposedly complicated skills like programming – no teacher was involved – only necessity and the will to learn. 

But moving on from them and back to us the educated (who I assume are the majority of those reading this): did we not continue to learn after we left school? Don’t we call that education as well? Or if we look at the process we undergo when we have to break in a new smartphone: by trial and error, asking, reading, discovery, past experience, we soon crack the phone. And this ability is not unique to us the educated – even the completely illiterate can figure out how to use a smart phone through a similar process.

What is my point?

My point is that our current schooling system, rooted as it is in the idea of  Educere, has lost part of its meaning. Educere leads us to believe that something has to be done to or for the child in order for Education to occur, and ignores the fact that everyone has the innate ability to learn in response to the challenges their environment throws at them. Educare carries this sense by acknowledging and works with this innate ability, and is the way human beings learnt for millennia before the industrial revolution anyway. The Education system should really be more concerned with providing an environment in which this learning can be supported, rather than one in which it is dictated and policed.

I was completely aghast, for instance, when I heard an education expert recently say that the way to reform our education system was to introduce the teaching of creativity and curiosity at an early age – which is completely absurd, of course, because children – people in general –  are naturally creative and curious – it is this being forced into the narrow tubing of schooling that convinces us that these are not desirable traits, and how we eventually abandon them.

The system of schooling that we have inherited served the dawn of industrialisation during which it was born very well: a steady supply of masses of human labour able to carry out repetitive tasks accurately, clerks to keep the accounts and write letters, and managers to ensure productivity and efficiency. In the present age these tasks have largely been mechanised, and instead humans are faced with addressing much more complex, evolving, and nuanced challenges: climate change; conflict; human rights abuses; (bad) governance; deepening inequality; and many other challenges that require collaborative and creative action, not simply a head full of facts and numbers.

One moment that stands out for me as I read Ranciere was observing myself learning all the different ways I could annotate the PDF I was reading; from highlighting only in yellow I graduated to highlighting in different colours; then I discovered I could insert notes; then I found out I could also underline text – and this could be a straight or a wiggly line; through necessity alone I learnt how to make more of reading a PDF, and I didn’t even to ask Mr. Google at any one time. For that matter I have never even attended a single school course on how to use a computer or MS word or send an email – all these I learnt through necessity, as many of us do.

All said and done: one might even argue that we have completely drifted away from the roots of the word itself. Our school system, and here I refer to the one in Uganda specifically, does not even try to draw out what is inside a child. We specify the precise form of what goes into the child, and then require them to give it right back as it is, and if they don’t they fail, drop out, and consider themselves failures henceforth.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a moment for us to look again at what this idea of education is about. What happens when the teacher and child cannot meet in a school? Does learning stop? Some say go online. But what about those without access? And even for those who have access, what is available online? Some say try homeschooling. But surely this is tantamount to saying “if they have no bread they should eat cake”? Without the necessary learning material, and given the differing capabilities of caretakers, besides that some would still have to attend to the business of making their living.

Next I will be looking more closely at the roots of the education system in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, and where these have gotten us today, before I dive into the interventions that are being explored by our government, as well as other players in the formal education space.

Education evolution or revolution?

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a period of deep reflection for us at Actualise Africa; so much so that we find that we cannot fit all our learnings in one post. Today, then, we will paint a picture of the bigger landscape of what experts within and without Uganda have been saying about how to re-imagine education, and over the next few posts delve deeper into the specific details around what it all means.

It all started for us with attending a webinar hosted by the Castle Think Tank at the end of May 2020, on the opportunities that the pandemic offers for the education sector, which explored the opportunities around “new models and new patterns of instruction [including] virtual classroom platforms among others”, while also acknowledging the limitations of switching to these in light of the general unpreparedness of the system (from schools, to teachers, to inflexibility thrown up by the need to complete the curriculum as well as sit national examinations).

This was followed by the Global Conference hosted by WISE in mid-June, on Education Disrupted, Education Re-imagined, through which I encountered all sorts of innovations across the globe, which successfully create opportunities for meaningful learning for children across socio-economic strata, and often within highly resource-constrained environments. These included the work by Barefoot College, Education above all (who also provide some great self-guided learning materials for different age-groups),  as well as KIWIXwhich allows you to access free learning material even when one is offline; in addition to these were educational apps that can help solve math problems, to those using artificial intelligence to help you learn English. It was also very gratifying to learn that WISE recognised Larry Rosenstock for their 2019 Prize for education – he is the founder of the innovative High Tech High, that is built on a project based learning.

In any case, a chance question by one of the speakers at the WISE conference led me to a series of articles on Medium  on Education Re-imagined:

For a homework assignment, or even for a test or an examination: why don’t we allow children to share answers with one another? Isn’t this another opportunity for them to learn?

This question really struck me because if you think about it, WHY NOT? Some of you will say: oh, but that is copying, and if the child simply reproduces the answer in their book for the sake of a mark I would agree that it is; but: what if the child can get to learn something they did not learn when the teacher first taught it, then isn’t it another opportunity to learn?

The Artificial Intelligence Pioneer and Educator Seymour Papert had an even more radical suggestion when asked what he would do if he had the power to reinvent the education system:

[Do] away with the curriculum. Do away with segregation by age. And do away with the idea that there should be uniformity of all schools and in what people learn.”

This is akin to the views expressed by our own brilliant scholar Sylvia Tamale, who in a seminar on decolonising the education said something to the effect of:

The education system is a broken pot by now. Trying to patch it up by filling in the cracks is futile. It would be better to simply break that pot to pieces, go down to the river and get new clay for a new pot.

At the time this really made a lot of sense to me, but discussing it with colleagues later it was judged as unwise; apparently this would call for a revolution, whereas what was needed was an evolution: changing the system gradually and step by step. And this is the question that faces us today.

I come back to the question that prompted this piece: what opportunities does the COVID-19 pandemic offer us?

The COViD-19 pandemic appears to have exposed some major deficiencies in our education system, such as the true divide between the haves and have nots,  as well as our over-reliance on physical buildings and teachers; further, as very well outlined by Prof Mkwanason Hyuha in this article in Uganda’s Daily Monitor Newspaper, we cannot keep schools closed until a vaccine is found, or else we exacerbate problems like creating a backlog of students in an already overstretched system, exposing the out-of-school children to criminal influences, child abuse and even early marriage, not to mention the loss of income by private schools and their employees, which may lead to some of them closing for good.

These problems, moreover, are not unique to Uganda because although by 1st April 2020 up to 1 billion children were out of school due to COVID-19, approximately 250 million were already out of school even before COVID 19, and on top of that 130 million children worldwide leave school after 4 years without basic reading or arithmetic skills annually! (Janvhi Kanoria, Director of Innovation Development, Education for All)

In the posts that follow I will explore ways in which to think about the conundrum that we find ourselves in, but I end this with my current thinking on the evolution vs revolution question:

The system is clearly broken (or at least leaking all over the place), but it is probably not wise to break the only pot we have before we have a new pot. The revolution has to occur over time: the new pot built alongside the old pot; creating and testing possible solutions, especially those that put learning more in the hands of the learner, and that bridge the divide between the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural, and the connected and the unconnected. The relationship between teacher and learner needs to be revisited and redefined. The entire notion of school re-imagined.

In addition, it is vitally important that this is an inclusive process: the students themselves, school drop-outs, teachers, school heads, school owners, parents, EduTech innovators, ministry officials, and curriculum developers, alternative education providers, the examination board, and everyone else who is involved in rethinking the education process, as well as all those affected by possible reforms. This inclusivity, in my thinking, has the best chances of having us all arrive at a truly transformative outcome, that re-imagines education that is meaningful for all Ugandans.