It’s time to review our education system

Education is meant to help to remove or at least reduce ignorance and bring about change by raising the general level of intelligence, plus vocational ability and skills in order to improve social mobility.

Any education system should be concerned not just with imparting information to students to regurgitate for academic purposes, but with helping to shape and improve vocational and professional attainment of skills, so that the future existence of a nation is maintained through knowledge, skills and experience.

The education system in Uganda has always given great weight and precedence to the development of young people by concentrating effort and resources on those academically capable, but has failed to provide additional avenues of choice, to enable less academically-minded students the opportunity to progress to degree level courses through, for example, apprenticeships and vocational programmes leading to widely recognised professional qualifications. By concentrating far too heavily on university and academic paperwork too few are provided with vocational qualifications and jobs in industry, innovations and manufacturing.

The Ugandan education systemt has fronted a societal establishment that uses metrics like the number of grade ones attained in national exams or number of teachers with advanced degrees in its evaluation, conveniently ignoring the quality of the education achievement of the students.

Numerous studies and reports, by academics on behalf of politicians, have highlighted the need to review our education but even with the plethora of advice in the “Kajubi report” for instance, resolving falling educational standards and academic achievement of the majority of the population continues to elude politicians and academics alike; deliberately or otherwise, suggesting that some, in politics, academia and in business, may have a vested interest in ignorance among majority Ugandans.

Over time, it has led to the situation where; hundreds of thousands of young people, already challenged by inequality of access to primary and secondary education, standardisation of school facilities or equipment and even quality of teachers and teaching methods, leave primary education unable to read and write or carry out basic sums, and then leave secondary education without academic or vocational qualifications and less chance of gaining employment.

We must, therefore, design a system that monitors students even when they have left school, a system that evaluates the relevance and applicability of the knowledge they acquired and the reward for their practice.

While Uganda’s education is important, (and one has to define what the parameters are, for a basic education system), it is a bog standard misconception that our education empowers people and is the route to bringing, dragging or leading people out of ignorance and poverty.

Our education is only the start and it demands investment by government in anything and everything to keep people in employment and decent earning and learning while contributing to the nation and society; and, that demands government to facilitate, legislate and fund such efforts. I hope the Education Minister shall do.

mwine.edgar@gmail.com