The PANAFRICAN Review
Critique of the proposal
Two key critiques for my proposal are the militarization of education and its efficacy for natural sciences . I am of the view that we are more likely to produce an enlightened division commander or regional police commander than we are from the current education system . If Rwanda will only go as far as its security forces will take it , then it follows that the most pressing challenge faced by society gets taken up by that sector . Indeed , if the most efficient and effective sector is the security sector then its reasonable that we ought to leverage that organisational capacity to solve what has been termed as an existential threat : “ an educational crisis that leads to a social crisis and ultimately an existential crisis ,” as Dr . Donald Kaberuka warned recently . If education is an existential threat , then it is a security threat and therefore it belongs to the security sector . In a counter-intuitive sense , taking education to the security sector may produce a symbiotic relationship that demilitarizes the armed forces , itself a pernicious legacy of colonialism .
A fraudulent education system considers natural sciences as disciplines that have nothing to do with the human spirit . Consequently , the need to craft an education system that cultivates personhood is easily understood when it comes to humanities and social sciences . Consequently , this obsession with compartmentalizing knowledge has struggled with producing self-actualized mathematicians , physicists , chemists , engineers , doctors , and lawyers . In other words , the subject is taught in a vacuum and its interaction with the social world constitutes an unguided missile subject to the kind of manipulation ; rather than producing human beings with a sense of mission in life ; a sense of honor ; a sense of what they want to accomplish for their society .
Clarity of the security sector
What seems clear is that people want structural change in education , as long as it deals with cosmetic improvements . They don ’ t want to hear that delivering that expectation is impossible simply because it is a contradiction . Consequently , I am now convinced that a slow change in the sector is the persistent expectation that conflicting imperatives should be pursued simultaneously .
Generally , there ’ s agreement that a three-step process is needed . First , properly defining what education means and what an educated Rwandan should know . Second , the imperative of putting in place structures to express that idea . Third , to identify the right human resource pool for delivering the idea along its structures . There ’ s controversy whenever an effort is made to address the three points in substance . The critics of my views were less hostile on the first two steps than they were on the third , which suggested that the military should take up the education sector . But is their hostility substantiated or dogmatic ? Consider these arguments .
They say the proposal amounts to “ militarizing ” education . However , they want an education sector that is efficient , effective , accountable and centralized around a clear purpose . When you tell them that commonsense and research ( Rwanda Governance Board RGB studies ) show that the institutions in the security sector ( army and police ) are the best performers on these measures , it becomes obvious that they want the organizational capacity of the army and the police but without the soldiers and police officers . But there ’ s a reason why these institutions are organized and have a sense of clarity about what it is they ought to do and how they should do it , which I called ‘ doctrine ’. I suggested that we don ’ t have a civilian doctrine – a system of values that we all prescribe to – precisely because the education system that was supposed to produce it suffered a stillbirth .
This is the intellectual dishonesty in this criticism . It takes the auxiliary argument regarding the security sector , reduces it to the military , and then transposes it over the primary thesis that demonstrates the imperative of organizational capacity and a sense of purpose in any changes we wish to see in our education system . In other words , any institution whose organizational capacity rivals the kind in the security sector would do well in overseeing education . But as the reality , and research demonstrate , such unique organizational capacity has thus far been demonstrable only in the security sector .
In fact , there has been a tendency to take officers of the army and police into leadership positions
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