Education crisis: The future in limbo
Oarabile Mosikare | Friday February 26, 2016 17:19
Education experts agree that Botswana’s education system is catastrophic. But all the answers are in the Revised National Policy on Education of 1994 (RNPE), otherwise known as the Kedikilwe Commission. “You can love, hate or ignore that document but at the end of the day you ought to go back to its contents if we really need to ameliorate the devastating state of affairs of our education system,” said Professor Agreement Lathi Jotia, a democracy and education specialist at the University of Botswana (UB).
Jotia also reasoned that part of the remedy to the education system in addition to the RNPE would be to listen to the concerns of the teachers unions and try to resolve all the issues amicably.
The UB don said one conference after another has been convened to try to search for answers for quality education. But it looks as though it would take more than just prayer and fasting before there are positive results.
He explained: “The centre is simply refusing to hold and it looks as though we are caught up in an education nightmare as a society.
In Ndebele they would refer to our current state of affairs as vula-vala (open and close), which literally translates to say you try to open a door and close it in an attempt to find a solution and nothing works. Everything is porous. From Primary School Leavers Education (PSLE), Junior Certificate (JC) and BGCSE, it’s a devastating calamity - our education system needs help.” He continued: “The BGCSE results say it all especially when looking at remote schools such as Matsha College and Shakawe Senior Secondary School which have performed dismally, although there is an improvement at Shakawe Senior and a decline at Matsha Senior compared to the 2014 results”.
“However, there is another disappointment especially looking at the fact that schools which are in and around the mainstream developed areas such as Kagiso, Shoshong, Shashe and Mmadinare have not produced good results especially given that Ghanzi Senior has performed better than some of them.
This obviously leaves us pondering a lot over whether issues of location have nagging impact on performance or not. Or is it just an issue of some administrators being good and others not being certain of what to do?” he added.
“As has always been advanced, the quality of education will remain a challenge so long as we continue with the gospel of automatic succession whereby even those students who have performed badly at PSLE, JC and BGCSE continue to be allowed to proceed to the next learning level.”
Jotia said the failure to improve the challenge of teacher-pupil ratio would continue to haunt this nation today and in many generations to come. The specialist explained that schools are not conveyor belts where a product just moves to the next level so it can be packaged and distributed. Teachers ought to have one-on-one time with their students especially the slow learners.
“The issue above ultimately gives birth to the demon of de-motivation of the teachers. To start with, once a teacher looks at all these alarming numbers of students, the only thing they can do is either to baby-seat the students or cruise after the syllabus regardless of who understands. After all we are not really educating nowadays but drilling for tests and examinations right?
“That is why it is not puzzling that you can have ‘excellent students’ who passed with flying colours but failing to express themselves at a job interview. Lack of teaching-learning resources as well as facilities such as housing and meagre remunerations given to teachers absolutely exacerbate the problems in our education system. There are instances where students go for a year without a prescribed textbook and in some instances students are made to share books in groups of four to five. What exactly do we expect to harvest from such a scenario?”
Multicultural issues also come to play in the education system, he said.
He wondered why it is that most of the schools within the urban and peri-urban areas do better. “Is it because they have good teachers, good students, good resources, caring parents or those are just the anointed schools which have being called by God to do well? How about issues of linguistic diversity in our teaching-learning process-does it have a factor?
“Do we see issues of socio-economic class impacting on performance? Why is it that our public schools are the ones who are failing the nation yet the private schools are doing extremely well? Finally, we ought to admit that the problems in our education system are troubling and embarrassing. Solutions are needed if at all we are to see a shift in the results. Who are we supposed to call to account? Do we need new policies or we just need to implement the old policies?”Another senior lecturer of education at the UB, Dr Philip Bulawa said it would seem that Batswana have now come to terms with the reality that when PSLE, JC and BGCSE results are officially released, they would range between very poor and deplorable. “It’s almost 10 years now since the nation has witnessed any significant improvement in students’ performance in their examination results. What is abundantly clear is that, there is a mismatch between such poor students’ academic outcomes and the global perspective about Botswana’s status as one of the very few upper-middle income African countries, with a relatively small population and adequate resources in comparison not just to almost all other African countries, but also to many others in different parts of the world,” said Bulawa.
He said one would be forgiven for harbouring a legitimate expectation of a country that should boast of very high standards of public education that should only match those of the best in the world.
Bulawa noted that the students’ academic attainment over the years has consistently depicted a picture of an education system that is only comparable to the poorest of the poor countries.
“These extremely low academic standards as reflected in students’ awful results at all levels of our education are a manifestation of a public education system that has no direction and therefore needs special and urgent attention.
However, while the decline in performances by the students has continued unabated for so many years, and to a point where this has now turned into a permanent crisis, the tragedy is that the Ministry of Education and Skills Development seems to be lacking ideas and capacity to be able come up with any permanent solution to this totally unacceptable and catastrophic situation. Unless the government comes to appreciate and accepts that our education is at tipping point, it could ultimately implode at any time when it would be too late to reverse the situation.”
Bulawa continued: “While the government may want to hide behind the Education and Training Sector Strategic Plan (ETSSP), as a panacea to challenges currently contributing to students poor results, my experience and that of Batswana in general, is that we have had such policy documents before, one of them being the RNPE. On paper this was a very good policy but it never achieved its intended purpose of among others, transforming the education system in light of the country’s changing and complex economy”.
He said it is a fact that implementation of the RNPE turned out to be a nightmare, and there is no guarantee that this one will be different. It is clear that currently there are many immediate challenges outside ETSSP that need to be addressed now than rely on a comprehensive policy which may not necessarily address such critical problems as awful academic results, he concluded.