IN THE PRESS

IT IS best to remain quiet on issues that you know nothing about rather than to open your mouth and embarrass yourself by exposing your ignorance.

But empty vessels always produce the loudest noise.

Last week, The Financial Gazette had a screaming headline titled, “Dokora experimenting with children’s future”.

With improving national pass rates being recorded, you wonder whether Dr Dokora is experimenting for the better or for the worse.

Anyway, the said article was full of factual errors.

The pink publication claimed that the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education has directed all schools to procure their buses from certain manufacturers.

It is common cause that the State Procurement Board is responsible for all Government institutions’ procurement, this process cannot be twisted willy-nilly.

In the same instalment, the Minister in charge of education, Dr Lazarus Dokora, is also said to have “unilaterally imposed the new curriculum without consultations”.

Fellow ladies and gentlemen of the Press, the contents of the document in question have been on our shelves since 1999.

One cannot wake up and claim that the document has been “hurried” because it was conceptualised nearly 20 years ago through the Nziramasanga Commission and was successfully piloted last year.

Clearly many people do not understand the new curriculum and its objectives. Considering that education is an emotive matter and a great percentage of the country’s population goes through the system, the Education Ministry has a herculean task of educating stakeholders.

Still at it, this business of quoting unnamed sources in the media needs to stop, it breeds suspicion, especially in these agenda-setting publications.

Of late, the Education Ministry has embarked on several initiatives aimed at improving the country’s education system, credit needs to be given where it’s due.

Give the honourable minister a break.