Flipping our world by educating ourselves Part 1
Flipping our world by educating ourselves Part 1:
If you were to travel around the world and tell everybody you meet that you came from Africa, you will be more likely to notice patterns in how people perceive you. Bellow I have tried to compile an incomplete list of my personal observation:
| • For the most part issues such as HIV/AIDS, poverty and crime clouds people’s perception of you. • To the young and curious minds; under-development and civilization or lack thereof are usually at the forefront. Africans are perceived to live in jungles mingling with animals. • In the professional field; incompetence, slow, corruption, poor sense of urgency and lack of value for time usually comes to the forefront. |
• In the eyes of those fed-up with giving funds year after year, Africans or developing nations for that matter, are incapable of taking care of themselves, and perhaps are inferior beings to those in other parts of the world.
Coming back home, most governments are spending more resources in the education and health sectors with little tangible outcome. Hospitals and schools are in no better shape than they were 10,20,30 years ago. More teachers, nurses and doctors are leaving their professions every year; some for other sectors within their countries while some are moving overseas.
To make matters worse, once they leave these professions, their knowledge is gone with them and the environment does not permit them to keep injecting the knowledge into school systems. For many schools in developing world, the teacher is the only source of knowledge; there are no ways to get additional or alternative views to what the teacher knows.
Year after year more students leaving secondary schools end-up in streets, with no hope of getting jobs because the education systems is failing to adequately prepare them for the real world. Investors are importing skills from their own countries to do even the most basic job functions and are doing very little (or are at least accused of doing little ) in transferring skills and knowledge to the local workforce; or perhaps it is that the local workforce is reluctant to learn the trade. As a result, we are seeing more of the same few people doing everything and this gives birth to the notion of “A SMALL WORLD”.
Actually, the truth is that it is still a big world where only the few are privileged to be noticeable. For many young minds, the need to be noticed and be noticed quickly is definitely not through education, politics and political affiliation/connections have become a vehicle towards being noticeable. I am not saying that politics is not suitable for young people, but I am saying political activism should be accompanied by competence and sense of responsibility to the country over individual egos.
Now how do we turn things around? This is not a question I take lightly, considering that I started first grade in a rural African village with 50 other students crammed in one single classroom, of which only about 4% (2 people) were able to get a Bachelors degree and only one with a post graduate qualification. I care too much about my first grade classmates to consider this situation acceptable.
To start with, bellow are some of the things we need to work on if we are to turn things around:
| • We have got to enforce/encourage curiosity and the need to master a concept among the young people.
• We need to provide a supportive teaching/learning environment with the governments playing a facilitative role (after all governments are the biggest investors, some good return on investment would be good for good governance). |
• We need to enable former teachers, current teachers, community volunteers, parents, specialized professionals and NGOs to develop and distribute teaching and learning materials.
• Acquire and keep the knowledge (which may not necessarily the people). In the current environment, if a fifty-year old person dies, they go with everything they know, nothing is recorded, nothing is passed on. The same thing is happening in education and health sectors, if a mathematics teacher or a nurse leaves the profession, they leave with all they know. In other words, society is investing more in individuals than in a system where results or knowledge can be replicated regardless of who is performing the function.
Tackling these three major issues will enable countries to close the gap in access to information/knowledge between those in urban and rural areas; which in return will contribute to poverty alleviation and increase competitive capacity of under-privileged children without putting anybody at a disadvantage.
These issues influenced the foundation of Udjuni education management ( http://www.udjuni.com ) which is a free web-based school management platform that enable schools to share resources including teaching and learning materials. Discover the students’ learning needs and issues as soon as they become visible and move swiftly to help them overcome the challenges. Join the revolution in the way we teach and learn
Stay tuned for Part 2 in which we are going to tackle the specifics on how to address the issues raised above.
Filed under: Education