Frederick Philander
22 April 2008
Windhoek — 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.
He suggested Africans should have sat around the fire and discussed with what it was they wanted to replace the oppressed being.
"We should have discussed ways to replace the one with an oppressive tendency, to replace the self-righteous individual, to replace the liberated and fill the society with free citizens, equal in terms of their obligations and responsibilities as well as their privileges and rights," he asserted.
Education in every facet is about moulding an individual to become a better human being.
"You cannot teach every child computer skills and send them to a village where there is no electricity. You are creating a monster in that community.
Last week, I was trying to find an understanding about the examination failure rates of last year and 2006. The director confidently said, 'Namibian learners don't fail anymore'. We don't talk about pass and fail anymore in our new system. If a learner passes one out of nine subjects that person passes the subject. What happens to the other eight? We don't fail them, but move them," he revealed.
In every experience of humanity by which we strive to be better, one ought to say one succeeded or did not succeed.
"There must be a cut-off point between good and bad, good and evil, moral and immoral, right and wrong, correct and incorrect, yesterday and tomorrow, day and night. A system of education is a common place, is a composite of ideals, values, ethics and moralities that emerge out of the body politic in society which says if we do this the greatest number of our people will be satisfied. To serve the majority and encourage them to be and become better," he said.
"When you cannot tell the difference between right and wrong, how do you teach? Who are you to teach if you yourself don't know whether you are right or wrong. At Independence most teachers were teaching in Afrikaans. The political order gave a decree: from next week we all teach in English. The person announcing the decree didn't know how to say the decree correctly in English. The teachers then went to work and taught in English, but became a source of ridicule because of their lack of ability to teach in English."
Diescho summed up his philosophy on education as follows:
"One lamp that illuminates our minds about education is the lamp of the truth. If education is not about the truth it is meaningless, it's mis-education, dis-education and de-education. Are we teaching our young people the truth about ourselves?
"If we begin to say that all that is relevant and honorable and commendable in the life of an ordinary Namibian is the extent to which he or she contributed to the liberation struggle - how true is that? You cannot therefore tell a child that what you did in relation to the colonialists is the beginning of your essence. The truth and only the truth shall set us free."
Those who do not take into cognizance memory, will go like a vessel on the open ocean without direction.
"Memory needs to be recognized as the foundation of self-definition. The repository of that which is important, the return to our childhood dreams. Who am I? Where am I? Where was I? With whom was I there? Where am I going? By what mandate do I have the right to exist? Memory is a torch that takes one forward."
Education gives people power to be, become and do and change.
"That is why we spend so many years acquiring education. It is in education that we know how to improve that which we do. We become self-critical and meta-critical. We imagine life from the perspective of other people. What would the other person feel if I do what I want to do? Have we ever asked ourselves as Namibians the question what we really want our children to become tomorrow if this is the education we have chosen?"
He also charged that the Namibian society teems with non-beauty instead of beauty, an important part of education.
"Where black people live in the majority they don't look after their neighbourhoods until the country's President comes to visit them, or until investors are coming. Then the leaders would tell them to clean up your streets and their neighbourhoods because investors are coming. I say we in Africa often lack beauty, we behave better only when we have visitors from Europe," he said.
He urged Namibians to learn about better relationships with one another to become better citizens.
"Our education has to include the beauty of Africa and its people and resources. Education in our country has to deal with understanding that the problems we face are African in content and character. Therefore, the solution must be African in character also. Education ought to remind learners that their parents love them. The reason we see so much militancy in our society is that there is no real love," he said.
He concluded that education should be about celebration, protection, defence and justification.
"We all need a decent life regardless of the ancestry we have, regardless of where we were in the days of war, regardless how tall or poor we are."
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