Urgent measures have to be taken now

Mmegi Editor | Friday February 26, 2016 12:37

We have made strides in many aspects, such as health, infrastructure development, and access to basic education. We may not have achieved the goals we set in the Vision 2016, to a desired degree, but it is not all doom and gloom. As we enter a new era, we can proudly look back and celebrate our achievements such as an increase in the number of senior secondary school intake, increase in tertiary education intake, as well as Batswana taking up jobs that were a reserve of expatriates just over a decade ago.

However, we also have to do some bit of introspection especially on the quality of education we are offering to our children, and the quality of graduates they are. Since the beginning of this month we have witnessed a number of student demonstrations at both government and private tertiary institutions in the country. After several weeks of unrest, the authorities have shut down New Era College in Gaborone as they try to investigate the allegations made by the students on the quality of education they are getting. On Wednesday, students of Gaborone Technical College also engaged in a peaceful demonstration demanding better quality of education.

These demonstrations are not new in Botswana as others have come before them but were met with hard-handedness from both the owners of institutions and the sponsor, being the government.

This indeed is time for us to introspect and identify problematic areas. Such areas maybe the fact that in our quest to increase access to tertiary education, we may have allowed unscrupulous businessmen to rob us of our hard earned revenues, pretending to be educators.

Secondly, it is possible that the institutions we have established for education quality assurance do not have enough manpower to execute their mandate of ensuring that the schools curricular is up to desired standards. There may be more reasons for this.

We cannot sit back and watch as our education system rots from primary school to tertiary education if we desire to compete globally. It is therefore important to establish a task force to assess the education system, establish if the problems at tertiary institutions are interlinked with those at lower level.

It is never too late to rectify a mistake if one was genuine about their intentions. We implore the assistant minister to seriously consider this proposal so he can find the cure for this cancer and we trust that indeed he is worried.

Today’s thought

Access to quality education has enabled me to reach far beyond the Bangladeshi village I grew up in.

– Muhammad Yunus