The Soft Issue
August 2017
Story from Outside
The way we lEARN IS
broken
By: Super Sanusi
I
spent quite a bit of time walking around the
IMPACT Challenger exhibition halls, at the IMPACT
Arena, Pak Kret, in the north of Bangkok, Thailand
where the ITU exhibitions took place this year and
after covering most of its 60,000 square meters,
(side bar: It’s the largest column-less exhibition hall
in the world. I can write a whole story about the
whole Arena and how it highlights our infrastructure
deficit, but I’ll be digressing) a couple of things
struck me, the most obvious being the difference
between the way Africa approached technology as
compared to the rest of the world.
for the future.
Right there on the exhibition floor, I started to
ask myself why that was so and for the next few
days it kept niggling at the back of my mind. I’m
sure that being in Bangkok didn’t help, seeing as
almost at every turn, it reminded me of Lagos …
or rather what Lagos would be like if we generally
had sense and Lagos worked. The parallels
between both cities are really hard to ignore, but
that is a story for another day.
The first thing I concluded was that it wasn’t what
we were taught, because one of the common
themes across all the tech entrepreneurs,
programmers and the like from across the
continent, which I have come across is that they
mostly are self-taught, or at least picked up their
skills from outside the four walls of a school. So
we definitely weren’t taught to build the past in
school. That’s not to say we were taught anything
relevant, but as is the trend with this post, that’s a
story for another story.
The African countries who attended the exhibition
(without any exceptions) were happy to show school
management systems, document management
systems, or some app that didn’t really solve any
problem but the fact that it was an app was meant
to be mind-blowing … and the like … stuff that isn’t so
different from the apps that were built in, and got
popular in the late 80s and early 90s. Maybe with a
lick of paint here and there, but fundamentally not
different from what’s been out there for the past 20
or more years.
So what was it? Culture maybe? And just as I was
moving my thoughts in that direction, it hit me.
It was school. It wasn’t WHAT we were taught
though, it was HOW we were taught.
On the alternate, the Asians, Europeans and
Americans were demoing stuff that wasn’t even
relevant today, but stuff that could be very useful in
the future. For example, I saw at least two Chinese
companies demoing 5G speeds with around 10GB/s
throughput, some young Indians built a system for
managing traffic in smart cities of the future, some
German doctors were demoing their blockchain-
based solution to medical records for the future,
there was smart agriculture — plants connected
to sensors and computers to optimize nutrient
and water uptake and plant growth, smart cars,
virtual reality applications, smart weapon guidance
systems…and so on.
I’m basing the next bit on the Nigerian situation,
but I think it does cut across most of (Sub-
Saharan) Africa.
You see, the very first thing you learn in Nigerian
formal education, is the A-B-C-DEE EFG song.
So from the onset you learn to commit the
English alphabet to memory as a song without
necessarily knowing why. At no point does
anyone explain either, all that is important is that
you remember the alphabet…one can argue that
at the age you learn the alphabet, there’s not
much else you can learn and get away with it (I
don’t buy that argument by the way), but there’s
If the stark difference between both sides hasn’t hit
you yet, I will summarize it as this: For some weird
reason, Africa is only now learning to build stuff that
was built a long time ago. Everyone else is building
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the
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