EDUCATION IN THE AGE OF TOMORROW.

In the late 1800s when the Europeans came to Africa, they introduced a form of education akin to those in the native countries that was meant to train personnel in their new colonies to help them in the their expeditions with less difficulty. They built schools and churches through which literacy and skills were taught to the people.

Fast forward to the 21st century, the schools and institutions that the colonialists introduced in their former colonies haven’t evolved much. Fundamentally, they still serve the same purpose as they did before and the nature of education has not evolved much either. In fact, the number of changes and iterations that the curriculum has undergone ever since its introduction are very few. This then raises the question; what is education and what is the fundamental goal of the school system that individuals should aim to achieve?

In my experience, people go to school for different reasons and aim to achieve different goals. For the vast majority of people, school is synonymous with getting good grades. Students aim to game the education system by doing a set of things very well that will in turn maximize the odds of getting good results at the end of the academic years.

In my second year at the university, there was a course unit that had to do with creating software using Java programming language. For newbies to computer programming, it seemed like an impossible task to harness the power of Java to solve real world problems in a very short time span where a lecturer could show up once a week and tell you about the different data types and concepts such as abstraction and inheritance, and yet doesn’t have an actual repertoire of his works and achievements using the language.

But here is the kicker, the lecturer had been lecturing the same course unit for more than a decade and every year, he showed up and repeated the same content in the same manner to a different cohort of students.

In essence, showing up and regurgitating the same content year after year was a quota that he had to fill to get paid. The incentive was in plain sight, show up and get paid at the end of the month. All one had to do was to read his past papers and go for the exam, and voila, one has passed. This is the current state of the school system in many school systems.

If anything, schools have evolved to be indoctrination centers. Students in schools are taught to think in the same pattern and expect a certain set of outcomes depending on the variables at at play and as a result, they end up producing brain washed zombies incapable of original thought.

Most students have no idea of what they want to spend their lives doing and yet universities expect them to know this impossible task before enrolling. There are many students who confessed later on in their college days that they had no interest in what they are studying and were ill informed while applying. Schools have evolved very little from their initial purpose in the late 1800s and still aim to train students to provide certain skills to an employer, in most cases the government.

But, what does it mean to be educated? The educated person is not the one with the best grades or the one who memorized the most facts or the one who crammed the most content to pass an exam. In the words of the renown nobel-laurrette, Albert Einstein, education is the training of the mind to think. The measure of knowledge is its practical importance to society. The truly educated mind is the one capable of connecting different dots from different disciplines and deducing solutions that of practical importance to society. The educated mind is the one that builds solutions to help fellow humans in a way that expands the possibility of what the human being is capable of. Therefore, it is incumbent on us not to fool ourselves into thinking we are being educated while in fact that could not be the case.

Rather, one should aim to attain knowledge and skills to create 21st century solutions to the problems facing Africa. The plain failure of the education system is visible from its inability to produce original thinkers and industrialists to propel Africa into the next phase of development, out of its third world status. The GDP of Uganda of $40bn by a population of more than 40 million citizens is a testament to this failure.

Yours,

DRALETI LOUIS.

Twitter @dral1234