allAfrica.com: Namibia: Diescho Hammers ETSIP, Education (Page 1 of 2)

Academic and political analyst Dr Joseph Diescho on Thursday evening scathingly criticized the country's education system and denounced the ETSIP programme as a misnomer.

He was the keynote speaker at the third in a series of TUCSIN lectures on education at a packed hall.

"I have asked a number of Ministry of Education officials about the logic of learners passing or not passing under the new examination system, even policymakers. Not one of them could really explain the logic behind it.

However, a female official admitted that they don't understand the grading system. 'We only work here,' she told me," Diescho said during question time.

A number of teachers, union members and officials of the ministry of education attended the lively gathering.

The same woman, according to Diescho, also explained that the ETSIP programme came about by way of donor requirements, insisting that if the ministry wanted money from them the present education system had to be followed.

"The ETSIP situation, I really don't understand it. I informed the former deputy minister of local government, the former director of elections and a very good comrade, Professor Gerhard Tötemeyer, that I was going to talk about the programme. He advised me not to say anything about the programme because he didn't understand it either," the academic said amid bursts of laughter from the audience.

"The foreword written by the Minister of Education in the ETSIP document turned me off, stating that 'the government has spent the lion's share of the national budget on education, but the outcome does not justify the money we have spent on education.' What more do you want me to say about ETSIP?" he asked.

According to him, education affects young and old, rich and poor, born and unborn.

"You will understand that education is an agency of change, which plagues every nation including those nations considering themselves developed. We, by virtue of being human, are gifted with attributes that can be promoted, elaborated and excelled to become better. No one is a clean slate or empty headed. When we go to an institution of education, one already possesses the qualities that will allow education to take place," he said.

Unam currently runs a society called The Socratic Society to teach young people to reason.

"In essence, this particular organization teaches students to formalize their body of argument and to sustain it, but do not raise your voice. In my view, there should be a process through which young people are educated to become the overseers of society like it used to be in Greece," he said.

He said with religious colonialist education, bad as it was, there was a possession and understanding among colonialists that one had to learn certain things, chief among which was prayer, reading, writing and arithmetic.

"There was an argument that the natives of Africa needed to be helped from themselves by bringing enlightenment in their minds so that they would fear death. So the missionaries would come and warn the natives to be careful if one didn't change in the manner they wanted to fashion them and that when one died, there was no hope for us in heaven. The more you suffered on earth the better one's chances were in heaven," he said.

There was good intention with colonialist education, but there were many contradictions and paradoxes.

"In the real apartheid education there was no equality between blacks and whites. Education had to do more with morality than to survive in the world, more to do with fear, angst, doubt about who you are. But what did education do, come Independence?" he asked.

"We have struggled for a long time to become free. We have braved and sung to become liberated. We have agitated to be united. We have gone on long marches to create one Namibia, one nation. It is true colonial and apartheid education was hell bent to destroy Namibia's culture, to pulverize our minds, to squash our self-understanding, erase our memories, replace it with no memory, replace it with emulation and imitation and attempt to be other than who you were," he said.

The tragedy of education in Africa is that not one of the 53 independent African states now part of the African Union (AU) got the story of education right.

"The question is how do we speak about criticism in an African milieu short of sounding that you hate the government? The point is our education system both prior to and after Independence did not prepare us to become full citizens of our country. Both colonial and post-colonial education prepared us to be indifferent towards each other, to be suspicious of each other, to doubt each other, to call each other names and as long as we can point fingers at other people," Diescho said.

web allafrica.com	Enter your search terms	Submit search form
OR subscribers use AllAfrica's premium search engine


Use our pull-down menus to find more stories

Today's Most Active Stories