The Sunday Mail
Maxwell Rafomoyo
As the 2015 school calendar opens on Tuesday, a myriad of mind-boggling questions about the fate of students under the current education system have popped up.
Parents and guardians spend fortunes ensuring their children get high quality education that will be a passport to blissful adult life, and for the benefit of posterity.
Regrettably, the curriculum has over the years failed to provide answers to the needs of these parents, school graduates, youths and the nation at large.
Ordinary Level results remain dismal with only about 20 percent making it and the rest relegated to failures.
The present curriculum could, to a large extent, be blamed for failing to mould graduates who fit into the existing socio-economic terrain.
It has also failed to prepare learners for tasks, opportunities, responsibilities, roles and experiences of adult life.
The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education set out to review the curriculum in October 2014 in an all-inclusive process bringing together industry, the financial service sector, small and medium enterprises, churches, civil society, Government ministries and departments, universities, and the general public.
By mid-year, there should be a curriculum document that will culminate in the development of syllabus prototypes.
The review is unequivocally a tremendous step and brings currency to quality education in Zimbabwe.
The recommendations of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry on Education and Training of 1999 – popularly known as the Nziramasanga Commission because it was chaired by Professor Caiaphas Nziramasanga – are yet to be fully implemented. What has been done is cherry-pick some of them, including, for example, banning Zimbabwe Junior Certificate examinations, introducing ECD B in 2005 and subsequently ECD A in 2010.
There is still need to implement the bulk of the recommendations while simultaneously checking whether they are consonant with the ever-changing world.
A good curriculum is central to unlocking the potential of learners, enabling them to fluidly feed into the socio-economic growth of a country.
Opening the Eighth Parliament, President Mugabe clearly pointed out that a good curriculum is pivotal to real socio-economic transformation, saying: “. . . There is need to transform the structure and curriculum of the country’s education system in order to adequately meet the evolving national development aspirations.
“This should see greater focus being placed on teaching and learning of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, including prioritisation of youth empowerment and entrepreneurship development.”
The new curriculum should make critical thinking skills development central to education outcomes.
This must be considered in terms of curriculum content, assessment as well as teacher training.
Deliberate effort should be put into coming up with a curriculum that focuses on building a holistic and total being.
Therefore, the curriculum should have a strong element of ethics in business, politics and religion to counter social ills like corruption which has become endemic. It is imperative at this juncture for the curriculum to redress dismal performances in public examinations, especially at O-level.
The assessment criteria should not just focus on public summative examination as the major benchmark.
Instead, the spotlight should also be on total learning using the Bloom’s taxonomy where learning should take place and be visible in the three domains; cognitive, psychomotor and the affective.
Hence, formative evaluation and course work should also be a central part of examination as these are critical to skills development, knowledge retention and application.
The proposed curriculum should be gender responsive and also be accommodative of other cross-cutting themes such as HIV and Aids, civic education, life-skills, national and self-consciousness.
It should generically be adequately relevant and be part of processes that drive the economy.
It should include the life-skills approach and shape a resilient population through inclusion of disaster risk management as important components.
Science and Mathematics have become the in thing in current learning trends and the new curriculum should have a strong inclination towards them.
In addition, the curriculum should promote information communication technology (ICT) use, not just as a subject, but as a tool to learning.
Technical and vocational education and training (TVET), as espoused by the Commission, should be expedited.
It is the bedrock of small and medium enterprises.
The curriculum must address industry requirements by developing learners with requisite skills and virtues of self-reliance and entrepreneurship.
Over the years, the current curriculum has produced employment-seekers rather than employment-creators.
This is largely because for all the concepts learnt, there is more of memorisation as opposed to decoding learnt concepts to meaningful psychomotor skills; gross or fine.
Hence, the new thrust should aim to churn out employable graduates who are also capable of creating employment.
This will address the fundamental issue of schooling versus learning.
Further, the new curriculum should focus on financial literacy.
Most small and medium scale entrepreneurs – who now form the bulk of employment in Zimbabwe – are financially illiterate, lacking basic financial skills of running their enterprises.
Education must have an underpinning philosophy to ensure uniqueness and sustainable development as is the case in countries such as Japan.
According to the Nziramasanga Commission, education should have a philosophy of Ubuntu/Unhu, which ensures the system does not produce learned mercenaries.
It should produce graduates with values that make us a people.
In the same vein, it should promote natural talents and aptitudes such as sporting, art, music, dance and other so-called co- curricular activities.
Yes, the pedal of curriculum review is within the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education.
However, it is quite clear that – as an issue of national interest and part of history-making – all progressive nationals, civic organisations and Government departments and ministries should participate.
