“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”. Nelson Mandela, and Confucius said that “if your plan is for 1 year, plant rice. If your plan is for 10 years, plant trees. But if your plan is 100 years educate children”.
Many countries invest heavily in the education sector in an attempt to ensure human resource development for sustainable development. However, the quality provided in many incidences is what should be of concern to the designers of the national curriculum. The education policy should go beyond the emphasis on quantity (chasing literacy levels) of a particular nation, and focus on the quality of the product of this very process. Quality education outcomes at an individual, community and national levels should have a direct link with human and national development making it a fundamental development pillar and therefore critical to tackling it from a development perspective.
The government of Uganda just like other countries considers education a basic human right whereby participating in education is viewed as part of the solution to reducing poverty. Hence it dedicates its energy and resources to providing equitable access to quality and affordable education to all Ugandans, through its mission statement which is “to provide for, support, guide, coordinate, regulate and promote quality education and sports to all persons in Uganda for national integration, individual and national development”.
However, the issue of quality education is fast eluding us as we accommodate the commercialization of the education sector through privately run education institutions with less supervision from the center and the corruption scourge.
Education is the process of facilitating learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits. It is an empowerment right, and an indispensable means of realizing other human rights. It is the primary vehicle by which economically and socially marginalized people including refugees and the host community can get out of poverty and fully participate in development.
Education is an art of appreciating life. It is purposed to teach us values, develop stimulated intellect, understand tolerance for disagreeable belief systems, dig out opportunities to question what exists, and contribute to the growth of the human society. Here, we may not talk about only socio-cultural values, but a holistic development of an individual who is well placed to evaluate the dynamics of all components of human societies (social, cultural, economic, legal and whatnot) and give them a perspective without prejudice. Of course, humans are full of prejudices by nature, but one can regulate them through proper education. It makes us aware of our biases and also helps us to accept systems which contrast our beliefs.
And it’s the ability to think, and apply the knowledge in the world and know the value of life. It is not about learning life, because education itself is life and a key to finding great characters hidden in every individual
Quality education goes beyond earning degrees; it is more than bookish knowledge and It means inculcating moral values, positive thinking, the attitude of helping, the attitude of giving to society and ethical values, these are kinds of education products that are only able to bring changes in society. It helps individuals do their daily life activities in the best possible ways and makes them dutiful. It further helps you acquire skills and knowledge that will impact your development in life, and also gives a person all the necessary tools and awareness about how he can earn his daily bread and butter.
Citizens should, therefore, be made to know that education is not just to read and write but to make use of it for their own advantages and to utilize the knowledge for their growth and to understand how to create the world around us, how to sustain it for future generations and how to develop relations for existence.
Education is meant for developing something new rather than relying on old innovations like we have been doing in Africa where we are depending on outdated theories that are no longer applicable. True education enables someone to be able to identify what he knows and what he doesn’t know and is the only way to win the world and think deeply about something till its roots and understand the intention behind it.
Education should give you the ability to think, apply it in the world and to know the value of life, education is not about learning life, because education itself is life and a key to finding great characters hidden in every individual.
The right education is purposed to make every person to live independently and to gain freedom. In any way, protect a person both financially and also help them to live their life on their feet and help us to understand each and every individual role and responsibility in building society.
It allows to set standards of life, provide knowledge to understand the results of wrong decisions and help to find alternative ways, help us to know what harm we are doing to the world and guides us in protecting the world from all dangers which are caused by human beings. This is the wealth that can be transformed from ages to ages and possible only through the provision of quality education.
Education is important for children because they are the future of the world and they should be updated with current affairs. They are the pillars of the nation, to develop a country and the world, the future should be secure and the children are the weapons to build the nation with all their knowledge and right education.
The kind of education, we provide to our citizens should be the one that makes them all round citizens, with the ability to analyze issues independently and come up with workable lasting solutions, we cannot be teaching our children about the Rhino River and Canadian prairies as if we lack geographical features in our country or continent.
The education we give to the young one should transform them into responsible citizens, with values that go beyond self, but cares for what is around them and future generations, values systems that respect what is theirs as opposed to cherishing what is foreign, value systems that respect elders and maintains social cohesion.
Developing a new education system that is more practical than theoretical and promotes new innovations that are home-based, available and accessible. The kind of education that is based on appropriate technology with an indigenous knowledge base so as to delink our education system from the old colonial designed one that is not local knowledge-based but producing job seekers than job creators.
We should eschew the education system which continues to produce engineers that cannot produce a soft pin, and can’t work on our infrastructure and keep importing those from China and India, university graduates that can’t create jobs but seek one, we can’t continue spending money on hiring expatriates from other countries when we have universities in the land that graduate people on annual basis.
The education system should be the kind that puts emphasis on the interest of the learner, as opposed to the school and parent interest, because this explores the learner’s capability, interest as well as his/her potential, and this should be identified right from the tender age.
What needs to be done
This kind of education cannot just be wished for, there must be a deliberate effort to achieve it, which may include but not limited to proper alignment of government priorities regarding education, appropriate supervision and monitoring, making public schools more attractive than private schools which emphasize profit maximization as opposed to quality, retraining and re-equipping all schools with modern learning facilities, construction of suitable school infrastructure for our learners, enhancing salaries for teachers and instructors and attracting the best brains into education profession, establishing rules and discipline controls and criminalizing commercialization of education and establishing new systems of examining the learners.
Exams need to be made more practical than theoretical and make the process of examining our learners more friendly and enjoyable not torturous as is the case and also adopt an accumulative grading system as it is the practice in university than subjecting learners to a one time final exam that encourages cramming contents of many years , these are not machines but people, so the system of compiling a single exam from 2, 4 or 7 years of study and its then done in days is not only inhuman but defeats the goal of any education process.
As it is now, we are producing a workforce that is good at cramming subject matters than applying them in life challenges to better their lives, this must change, if we are to deal with the issue of the quality workforce for our nations.
There is nowhere one can teach culture, education in the right process to transform the culture to modern society. It is the perfect stage to mold a person into a complete leader with all the human emotions, values and heritage.
Parents should be active participants in issues related to their children’s education, their role should not stop at settling school dues, and buying uniforms and other scholastic materials but they should actively involve themselves in the day to day education issues of their children, both at school and home.
Quality education of future generation should be everyone’s concern and not a responsibility of central government alone, but it should be our civic duty too.
And we can together work towards ensuring quality education that will produce quality human resources for our sustainable development or we accumulate a big number of educated fools. The choice is ours.
Mr Paddy Kayondo is an educationist
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