Uganda Should Protect it’s Education Sector

By Tabi tha Naisiko

NATIONAL exams are done with; graduations have been performed and celebrated. Pupils and students are back for Christmas holidays. Several of them shun away from domestic chores. Some spend time on television soap operas, computer facebook, twitter and the Premier league.

Without participating in family production, they must consume. This poses a lot of questions concerning national wellbeing especially when the biggest portion of the population is not productive. In traditional African societies, production and reproduction goes hand in hand regardless of age and socialisation/education processes ensures this.

Learning embraces every aspect of life, including socioeconomic realities. For instance rites of passage, mentoring skills, memorization of idioms and proverbs and story telling protect the knowledge necessary for society’s survival. How empowering is the current form of education system in mentoring responsible citizens? Do very good grades necessarily translate into responsible citizens? Does ICT put cooked food on the table?

Picus (2001:86) defines education as a process by which people acquire knowledge, skills, values or attitudes. The word education is also used to mean the educational process. However, ideally, for Picus, education should help people develop an appreciation of their cultural heritage and live more satisfying lives. It should enable people to become more productive members of society, both as citizens sharing in the democratic process and as workers in the economy.

Also, Picus asserts the importance of education in the contemporary society being more critical than ever in human history. This is because society is too dynamic to the extent that education is required for reasons of increasing knowledge and understanding of the world through helping people to adjust to change, understanding these changes and providing skills for adjusting to them.

Therefore, for education to be appropriate, it ought to be holistic and should be able to address the needs of the community at any given time and space through; promoting the cognitive development – aiming at increasing a person’s knowledge and intellectual skills. The ability to think and reason effectively, promotes the affective development, which deals with feelings, values, and appreciations.

It aims at helping an individual develop moral and spiritual values as well as health attitudes and emotions. Such education is often called character education or citizenship education. And promoting the psychomotor development involves development of a person’s muscular or mechanical skills.

These skills are often related to handwriting, vocational and technical courses. One, therefore, ought to be wise, humane and physically able. With reference to Uganda, we notice concentration centred on cognitive development at the expense of other aspects.

Other aspects are not taught in school and may not appear on the curricula. On the other hand, parents have done whatever possible to keep the children away from home and community, so that they concentrate in school and get good grades in order to compete favourably in future. But which competition, when the children lack the required characters?

The challenge at hand is that graduates in most cases lack the required attitudes, feelings, and inspiration to operate beyond their cognitive education. They fail to use their feelings and bodies to participate in national development as reflected in shoddy work and incomplete tasks, which has cost people their lives.

To employ a person today, one may need to suspend his/her own job in order to supervise and ensure the work is complete. What type of education are the current professionals receiving to require all this supervision?

In Uganda, we are rich with technical advisors and planners, but lack implementers. Therefore, we cannot progress as a country. Many young graduates have good plans, but fail to implement despite availability of knowledge, skills and resources.

They do not know dreams require adventure, hardwork, discipline, patience and perseverance to be realised. The fame of family business and enterprises disappear immediately after the family head has died, because there is no more mentoring for succession. The young people spend most of their days in school and lack the required work ethic to sustain business.

With these inadequacies in training, many young people resort to short-term strategies for survival. They gamble; go for white-colour thieving, sham marriages, prostitution, and lack of ego, all of which result in domestic violence.

As advised by Karenga (1997) and Kanyandago (2000), Uganda should devise means of integrating culture and morality in the education system in order to teach virtues. These seem to be the missing aspects in the education system, lack of which leads to the problems impoverishing Uganda.

The Japanese have adhered to their cultural education, where they teach morals even in the formal education. Children are given virtue education at an early stage. In Uganda, this has been introduced in Kyamusansala Primary School, where children are given a big bowel of tiny multi-coloured beads and told to sew them in a pattern.

The children are already industrious and productive members of the community. For that, we may credit the Japanese industrialisation in training for such virtues as patience and perseverance.

Precisely, the challenges of education in human development call for ethical decisions. This requires an overhaul of the current system of education in the area of focus, content, methods and assessment. The future of any country lies in education.

Uganda cannot realise its vision of ‘prosperous people, harmonious nation and beautiful country’, when education is not streamlined. Otherwise the country is vulnerable to continuous education fatigue and dumping in form of indiscriminate modernisation. These will not solve our problems. There should be, therefore, academic sieving and education protectionism for the sake of human development.

The writer is a lecturer at Queen of Apostles, Joint
Philosophy Centre, Jinja.