Education and racial superiority would be sustained by teaching the battle-exploits of Napoleon Bonaparte not Shaka Zulu or Emperor Menelik , the philosophies of Aristotle and not Ahmed Baba . At independence , and the decades following , the urgent task for Africa ’ s education was to not only aggressively increase access but to equally radically decolonise the curriculum . Just like the state they inherited , independent African governments took over education systems that were alien and in many ways incompatible with the needs and aspirations of the masses .
Was it possible to enhance literacy and promote increased access to learning within the very education system that had been set up as part of the mission of “ civilising ” the backward African ? How was it possible to turn a system of education intended for the privileged few into a resource for the benefit of the many ? This was as daunting as the challenge of turning the colonial state , created as an instrument of violence against the colonised , into an institution for the good of citizens .
For a crop of independence leaders like Kwame Nkrumah in the Gold Coast , Kenneth Kaunda in Northern Rhodesia , Milton Obote in Uganda , to mention but these few , expanding access to elementary and secondary education was to advance the cause of human resources development but also for purposes of nation-building using a network of public schools . In Uganda in the 1960s and 1970s , for example , it was common practice for a student from the southwest to attend secondary school in the northeast of the country . Yet , while access increased tremendously and a sense of collective nation-belonging grew through a network of countryside high-quality public schools , the crux of the curriculum remained colonial – students were more likely to be taught which European explorer “ discovered ” the source of the Nile than which local African communities inhabited the area and their economic activities .
This colonial thrust of the education curriculum has remained largely unchanged . In fact , it has deepened under the neoliberal secondary and tertiary education era since the 1980s . At the higher levels of academia , our methodological and epistemological debates are dictated and determined by Western scholars and schools of thought even in otherwise progressive and emancipatory areas as Marxism .
At both the lower and higher levels of education and training , there is a palpable persistence of the colonial legacy of passive learning and conceiving education as merely consuming ideas and attaining skills usable in the job market . In elementary school , the goal is not to nurture young learners to think carefully and creatively ; it is to mechanically pump into their minds huge amounts of material even if making little sense . At the higher levels , at the university , training is not geared to liberating the mind and equipping the student with life-long skills ; rather , it is to orient the student about what the market wants of him / her and to seek to acquire ostensibly market-relevant skills .
Predictably , this misguided thinking has not worked . For the most part , African University graduates do not necessarily display the competencies needed in the market , thus many are both unemployed and unemployable . The simplistic blame is often reserved for university training being irrelevant and “ theoretical ”. The problem , though , is bigger than that .
At a fundamental and philosophical level , the whole curriculum , right from elementary school , is scandalous and a travesty of learning . Part of the problem is that it is actually not theoretical ! Why have matters remained this way and what is it that needs to be done ? Questions to which we shall return …
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Dr Moses Khisa is a Ugandan academic based at North Carolina State University .
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