The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
All these obsolete jobs imply that there must be a higher purpose to schooling. Education cannot be purely to prepare graduates for the factory floor. Instead, it holds, schooling should focus on teaching learners how to learn, how to be all round good citizens, and positive contributors to society.
Under this model, a lawyer who runs a beer depot, a psychiatrist who runs a chicken farm, and an architect who drives a taxi are not failures. They did not study useless courses because the value of what they studied is inside them not outside. Good schools impart skills, attitudes, and values. Education or school is not about putting potatoes in the pan. Anyone can do that. It is something deeper. When the philosopher Jean Piaget discussed it, he said: “The principal goal of education is to create people who are capable of doing new things; not simply repeating what other generations have done”.
Truly educated people who have shaped our civilisation cannot be compartmentalised into the sciences and arts or one job. The great Greek philosopher, Aristotle, was also an ethicist, rhetorician, biologist and zoologist and the great theoretical physicist Albert Einstein was a prolific political science thinker, writer, and activist.
Ugandans today are very eager to educate their children mostly because they believe, as the great late Nelson Mandela once said, that “education is a great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor; the son of a mine worker can become a mine head; that the child of a farm worker can become the president of a great nation”.
But many do not realise that the school system as we know it today, is a recent creation. Ancient civilisations; the Greeks, Africans, Romans, Indians and Chinese, had academies, madrasahs, Gurukuls, and the Jixia, but up to the 1920s even America and Europe had only one-roomed schools. Ugandans don’t know that school curriculums can be tailor-made to be relevant.
So Museveni, who studied political science, is wildly cheered when he lists it among useless courses. Many people jeer at economically deprived university certificate holders. Many are advised that illiterate market vendors make more money than them. Part of the reason for this is that people do not know the true purpose of the school education system. They think it is about making money.
Part of the problem is Museveni. Born in the early 1940s, the material deprivations of that period possibly shaped him into the quintessential material man. His mind was formed by the aftermath of the poverty of the 1930s Great Depression. The 1940s Second World War killed millions but because of poverty, great thinkers, along the lines of Maynard Keynes, celebrated the `full employment’ it created. Even when it ended, in 1944, they created the World Bank and IMF to guarantee material prosperity. These have so enthralled Museveni. Even his earlier embrace of Marxism can be traced more to fascination than conviction about the dialectics of materialism. So throughout his 30-years in power, Museveni has sought to build more roads, factories, classrooms, clinics, and dams. He prides in seeing more cars on the roads, more iron-roofed houses, and more and better guns for the army and police. Even his obsession with the physical sciences can be viewed best as the physicalism of latter day materialists.
In all this, Museveni does not ask why both the educated people with the best jobs in Uganda and the illiterates obsess about making money by hook or crook. Why Ugandan roads, hospitals, and schools are more corruption-ridden and costly to build. Why engineers cannot handle projects or doctors care about patients. If he did, he might find it has to do with poor education. Good education ensures one is not excited about material possessions but is fascinated by knowledge and intellect, ethical relationships, egalitarianism, and freedom; in other words, the pursuit of quality and not quantity in life. That is what great education does to the mind. The rest is training.
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editor@independent.co.ug
