Career guidance must emphasise behaviour code
IN LINE with the focus of the new curriculum and the new dispensation which both seek genuine transformation of principles and philosophies of doing things, those who champion career guidance for students must themselves speak a new language and offer a new focus of attention and purpose.
One such protagonist is Mr Watson Mlambo, a lecturer at Mutare Teachers’ College. He is one man who has recognised how we cannot guide our children into careers without worrying about their behavioural conduct.
Mlambo speaks to small groups of students, instead of addressing rallies of students who are not listening but busy enjoying the academic honeymoons called career guidance days. Here thousands of students who are busy looking for lovers, many of them drunk, pieced or ‘stuck’ with mbanje or bronco move from stand to stand more attracted to the girls or boys hanging around them than to the so–called career guidance.
The idea of small groups is perfect and effective. It raises the meaningfulness of one-on-one interaction. The students ask questions freely and learn the dos and donts of career planning or preparation.
Mlambo emphasises the critical importance of behavioural transformation and moral rearmament premised on the Maker of these students and these children. Such a loving and purposeful Maker can never only give intellectual or academic gifts, call them endowments, without expecting the recipients of these gifts to be Christ-like. God is a shareholder in all that man does as much as man has an assurance of shareholding in the Heavenly kingdom. That, God made as a permanent promise.
It is Mlambo’s belief that what has made modern education incomplete and certainly harmful in many ways today is the absence of God in the career guidance given. Very True!
Mlambo has been on Diamond FM Radio’s Head-To-Head with MM programme before, interrogating the need for a new approach in career guidance. He has fascinating ideas and deserves support from all those who believe Zimbabwe is in a new era of introspection and retrospection: an era open to doing business in a different way in different facets of life.
A good farmer changes the seed if he wants to make a different harvest. He does not continue to plant maize if he expects a sorghum harvest. Zimbabwe is short of people who can see and do things differently, even in the area of education. The new curriculum is testimony to this new thinking. Its main objective is to produce a 21st century student who is fit for purpose. And what better purpose can any institution proffer without realising and recognising God’s permanent role and business in it?
If all schools in Zimbabwe seriously offered organised moral rearmament, we would produce a better crop of exit profiles from them. If all career guidance ‘experts’ did not omit God in their assistance for students to carve career niches, we would have better, perhaps incorruptible politicians and civil servants, honest and trustworthy workers in private enterprise.
Catch them young, so goes the adage. We cannot teach Zimbabweans to shun corruption, dishonesty and integrity-free work ethics when they are already employed. Why? Because it simply is not wise! I dare say not possible even!
God bless our teachers, our learners, our education directors and planners! Give them wisdom to solve education problems, and not to be part of the perennial problems. Teach them to appreciate that every house man builds is as good or poor as its builders.