Union double faced on curriculum: Education ministry
AT the beginning of this year, the Government launched a new education curriculum that brought with it a lot of changes in the education sector.
It was received with mixed feelings by the country’s populace with those spearheading its implementation being demonised as it came against a background of lack of resources with the Government’s recruitment freeze causing a shortage of teachers in schools.
As if that was not enough the announcement by the ministry that parents could sell their livestock to pay their children’s school fees was greeted with a social media frenzy, miscontrued to say parents can take their livestock to schools, and got the nation laughing.
Sunday News senior reporter Tinomuda Chakanyuka spoke to the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education Dr Sylvia Utete-Masango on these and a variety of other issues that have been of interest. Excerpts of the interview are below: TC: The new curriculum is now one term into its implementation. What are your impressions so far?
DR UM: It’s not so much an impression but maybe taking stock of where we are and what we are planning to do, I think that is what is of essence. I can safely say the schools are doing well in terms of those grades or levels that are in the new curriculum. As you very well know that it is actually staggered, we did not implement the new curriculum the wholesale. So far we have had teams going out and monitoring the progress, there might be some areas that need revisiting, that was the whole reason why we phased the implementation of the new curriculum.
TC: You mentioned areas that need revisiting. Which areas are those?
DR UM: I was in Bulawayo recently to officiate at the conference for what we used to call Home Economics. The new curriculum is looking at those technical vocational areas as industry focused, but our teachers are still thinking about them in the old way so I had to arrange with Carousel Clothing Company for a tour. I could not take everyone as the attendance was over 650, so I had to take the leadership only. They were walked through and when we came back, before I addressed them, I asked them if they still think that Home Economics is still what we should continue to embrace and they said no, we now have to think differently. So these are some of the areas which I said the shift has been slow but still we are expecting that they should fall in line, especially in technical training areas, but the other areas are in sync with the new curriculum. I’m sure you have had an opportunity to witness the festivals that we held, at school and cluster levels where they were now showcasing these learning areas in practical terms.
TC: The minister has said some teachers and some school heads are yet to grasp the thrust of the new curriculum, what is being done to make sure that this is achieved at the earliest possible time?
DR UM: I think this should be expected with anything that is new. This is something new and its
In his latest circular to friends throughout the world Santos has raised an urgent call for the expansion of decolonial horizons and imaginations. human nature that we might not see it in the same way and also the level of understanding might differ from people to people. But we have a lot of advocacy, as you recall through the print media and electronic media. Right now on ZBC, every Tuesday, we have a radio programme where we are unpacking the new curriculum. We have also engaged the Sunday News, for example, in trying to respond to some of these areas. The training, as I’m talking, is ongoing, it was not a once-off thing. So from continuing to engage with the heads and the teachers, because it’s them who make things happen, we are even printing more curriculum frameworks so that each teacher has a copy.
TC: The Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (PTUZ) has petitioned Parliament to halt implementation of the new curriculum, citing a number of concerns. What is your response to the union’s stance?
DR UM: It’s quite interesting to say the least. I would not expect that union to be double faced, because under the curriculum we have five pillars that anchor the new curriculum. One of the pillars is the establishment of the Teaching Professions Council (TPC) and the working party or working team is made up of all the associations, PTUZ included. They have gone outside the country, they have even visited countries overseas and we are working with them. So if this is a component of the new curriculum, which curriculum do they not want to be implemented when they are directly involved. So I don’t know which curriculum they don’t want implemented. Maybe it’s a campaign gimmick. They (PTUZ) are part and parcel of the changes we are implementing, so I don’t see how you could then turn and say ah ah we don’t want the new curriculum.
TC: The new curriculum has been criticised by some for failing to dovetail with and complement the STEM initiative. It is viewed as emphasising less on Maths and Science subjects but more on Arts, Sports, Mass Displays and other such disciplines. What’s your reaction to such criticism?
DR UM: I think we tend to be very negative as a people because each ministry has its own mandate, you very well know the mandate of the Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education. Science is their core. So what they are advancing is not contradicting what the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education is promoting. We have started, as a ministry and rightly so, we have started at infant level, that is your four years olds, ECD to Grade Two. If you look at the learning areas Mathematics, Technology and Science start at that age. These are the core sciences that we are talking about. What we are saying is we need to build the foundation at that early age and the concepts are built from that early age and then at junior level we separate Mathematics as a standalone subject and Science as a stand-alone. Here we are talking of core or proper science and technology and we move on like that. The curriculum is broad. It’s not everyone who is scientifically inclined, and I don’t think we can build the country with just science people. We need everyone. We need the journalists to move the agenda of the country. We need sportsmen as a country, we need artistes, and we need economists. You can’t then ask why we are promoting those areas. There is a niche there and we are saying each learner will actually find his or her place in this education system.
TC: Let’s turn to the most recent topical issue. Livestock and labour in lieu of school fees for parents who cannot afford to raise school fees for their children. The suggestion created a lot of social media debate. How feasible is this arrangement?
DR UM: I thought these are ideas that are being floated and these ideas have not yet been concretised. There hasn’t been any official communication to that fact. So what we would be expecting are further suggestions from the stakeholders, to say under these circumstances can we not look at these possible actions so that we don’t sort of stifle schools. Schools can actually stop functioning because if they are not getting any funding it means we compromise standards, we compromise teaching and learning. We have not had anyone coming up with alternative or some further options that could be pursued under such circumstance. We remain open to suggestions. Those of our age, our parents were not formally employed as such. They had to find ways, without waiting for schools to organise things for them. Whatever they had, it could be in material form, because the school wants money, they would dispose of whatever they had in order to raise money to pay school fees. In some cases, for example most of us who hail from the rural areas, our parents would brew beer and sell. They were creative because they valued education. They would do anything possible to ensure that we received the education that we got. This is the sort of culture that seems to be missing in this era.
TC: Government has initiated the process of establishing a Teaching Professions Council. Tell us more about this initiative, its aims and objectives.
DR UM: There is a working party made up of the five teachers’ unions that are recognised, that are officially registered, then the Ministry of Public Services also represented. Th i s council is expected to
professionalise the education sector. Its aim is to register anyone who has to practice as a teacher, and for you to be a teacher you have to be a qualified one. That means it’s not enough to have a degree. You are not a teacher if you just have your degree, you must have the teaching diploma or what we call pedagogy for you to qualify as a teacher. If you are not registered you are not eligible to practice as a teacher. Then there is a code of conduct that is agreed by the profession and definitely if you then go against the code of conduct as agreed, there will be consequences. Just in the same manner that happens with the Law Society of Zimbabwe, if your embezzle Trust funds there will be consequences, or with doctors and their Medical Council, if you don’t play ball the consequences are known. So it’s the same things with this council, they will regulate and ensure that teachers conform. If you don’t conform then the consequences are there. Depending on the gravity of the matter you can either be warned or suspended for a given period or you can be de-registered. If you are de-registered you cannot practice and you cannot cross over to other countries in the (Sadc) region and think that you can practice there, because they will come back to us to check if you are registered with the council and if you are not they won’t take you. It’s a regulatory body, it is professionalising the profession. It is this council that will make sure that teachers are abreast of the changes in the sector, for example there might be stipulated workshops that the teacher is expected to attend in a year and if you miss those workshops that means you are not in sync with the trends and unfit to practice. TC: How much ground has been covered so far and when can we expect this council to be in place? DR UM: Quite a lot of ground has been covered. Right at the moment, it’s consultations. That working party that I have just alluded to went on a study tour in Scotland and Ireland to compare notes. We also had a meeting here with South Africa, because they already have a council and we shared their experiences. A draft report was put together and this report is now what is being circulated to the teachers. We went on an outreach programme and covered all the 10 provinces. We had specified in terms of the representation, where we said from each district apart from the district heads, we must have school head, head of department (HOD), senior teachers, and two or three teachers OVER the past 37 years of independence, we have succeeded to churn out more educated people from our public and private institutions. At the World Economic Forum held in Durban, South Africa, a little less than a week ago, The President of the Republic of Zimbabwe reminded the world that Zimbabwe’s literacy rate soars above compared to not more than one country in Africa.
This status has always presented Zimbabweans as an educated people whose prowess is evidence of the threat they pose to other educated citizens to the extent that they unleash terror. Although it is not entirely true that Zimbabweans take other people’s jobs, the utterance is a reflection of consent that they are good enough to do the jobs.
Varying literacy percentages have been given between 88 and 92%, but the exactness is not the point. What matters is that a lot, majority, almost everyone in Zimbabwe can read and write, that’s what literacy is, right? This has been at the benevolence of a championing Government which unlike most Southern African Countries, prioritised the intellectual elevation of the black and colonially disenfranchised population. Professor Rungano Zvobgo wrote that within a space of five years, the number of secondary schools rocketed from 197 in 1980 to 1215 in 1985. He goes on to argue that the enrolment also escalated in relation to the increase in institutions of learning. Despite the challenges the Government faced of developing a socialist education system within a capitalist economy, education prioritisation and interest still grew. My point here is not to narrate the success in national pedagogy as promised by the socialists of those days, neither is it to brag that we are more educated than majority of Mzansi based on the empirical evidence of people leading the economy in South Africa and graduating top of their classes in our neighbour’s schools. My argument today is how education has been dislocated as a barometer of measuring intelligence and relegating those who are unfortunate as dunderheads, in the process robbing us of the much needed brains in leadership.
Let me say politics is better off without educated people; the world is much safer without information robots that are best at regurgitating what they have been taught and consumed from dead men and women’s journals. They brag about referencing what other people thought and invite the criminal Gramsci as an authority to deconstruct inferences that are thought to be hegemonic, forgetting that Gramsci himself, a criminal used hegemony to make them believe that he was oppressed and innocent and they should believe in his thoughts even if they should think that other ideas are dominantly imposed. It’s as if the existence of knowledge started and died with those academic ghosts. It’s funny how academics, as they choose to call themselves, have spasms of amnesia when it comes to analysing their “toolness” in the process not seeing that being educated has made them robots, with programmed thinking, best at examining and recommending what was created by another man. Many systems the educated operate or research on, are products of intelligent men, not educated. Let me differentiate the two. Educated or intelligent: Check
yourself. Education is a formal process of consuming another person’s ideas and helps them grow. It is a mind arresting process of conforming to dictated rules, designed behaviour patterns and constructed thinking processes carefully crafted by hegemonic systems such that one becomes a tool, or in nicer terms, an adherent of other people’s beliefs. On the contrary, intelligence is the ability to solve issues, construct discourses, influence behaviours; above all, it is a non-conforming repository of performance patterns which thrives on creating a legacy and supremacy. This is my own understanding of the two — you are free to disagree with me. At that point I remembered that my grandmother, my uncle, my friend’s grandfather and the san people who lived in this land before we desecrated it were very intelligent people, able to create a legacy, solve issues and create discourses yet they did not get a formal education, and that is what colonialism has attempted to steal from us.
I stress the point formal education because that is what the world today refers to as modus of ascertaining intelligence. Seventeen years of pedagogic rehabilitation has been normalised by society as education. Today, man the thinker arrogates respect to he who has a prefixal reference of “Doctor Ncube, Professor Guvamatanga, Sensei