Why our education fails on its promise

It is time to rethink the idea that Rwandans don’t debate. #RWoT is a group of Rwandans on Twitter that has been doing much to burst this myth. Their reactions before, during, and after the debates on the Anangwe Show suggest that what they have been missing is a platform to air the views. Their turn-up in large numbers during the discussion on the subject of education prompted a follow-up edition ‘due to popular demand’ in which the Minister for Education almost had to show up given the interest the first instalment had garnered. Going by the vast interest in that discussion and the comments that followed, it is clear that education remains a particularly delicate subject. I pointed out in this column a while back, in a different context, that this emotion that comes with education is due to its potential to impact one’s life chances. Moreover, when these individual life stories of triumph are extended to the collective, the role of education as a transformative force for a society becomes almost self-evident. This is the expectation that our education systems must live up to. However, when they fail to deliver against these expectations, when the by-product is not readily visible in the lives of the individual and the collective, then it sets itself up for an image or perception that is not so flattering, to say the least. Conclusions will be made. For most of post-colonial Africa, one such conclusion is an exasperated demand that our education systems undergo a ‘total overhaul.’ Indeed, who has not read or heard in seminars and conferences of the need to ‘urgently revamp’ the education system of this or that country? This is the story of education in post-colonial Africa. When prompted for elaboration, the argument is usually that these education systems are colonial in orientation, that they were never intended to serve the interests of an independent society. Moreover, it is often said, their objective was to churn out graduates with the ability to facilitate the colonial state, to act as a buffer between the masses and colonial officialdom, as agents or middlemen in an alien enterprise. For the native, the objective of education was to ‘evolve.’ Most importantly, evolution meant giving up native values, to embrace those of the colonialists. For those who would successfully evolve, an elaborate reward system would await them. Which is how the natives would take on a new identity –as évolue, assimile, assimilados, or gentlemen in Belgian, French, Portuguese, or English colonial traditions, respectively – that would also afford them access to employment and elevated social status, above the native but below the colonialist. An education that is meant to detach an individual from himself, as it were, and from his society, makes a lot of sense in a colonial setting; however, to expect the same system to deliver the aspirations of the masses in an independent setting is akin to milking a cat. You may get something, but you probably shouldn’t drink it. In any case, these are the roots of disillusionment with education today. It is also the source of the contempt that most people have for the educated class. The frustration is borne out of the failure to produce a pool of thinkers who are capable of dismantling this colonial intellectual edifice, and to replace it with an alternative whose objectives serve the interests of independent society. The pertinent question becomes: if the colonial model is, by definition, hostile to domestic interests, and if the native was never intended to thrive under it, shouldn’t the value systems it underlies be interrogated, dismantled, and replaced? What is the replacement? Which begs another question: If the colonial education model is hostile and inadequate for a free society to thrive, what should its replacement model look like? It seems no one knows. Worst still, it appears no one wants to know. We look to our intellectuals, they look away. No eye contact – detachment. Consequently, nothing changes. Which is why our education systems stay erected on the old edifice, which takes the logic of the Enlightenment, its baby colonialism and domination, as self-evident truths whose values/virtues we must all ‘evolve’ onto and regurgitate. Clearly, a system that does not interrogate such logic, as well as its assumptions,kills the promise of education because it perpetuates the colonial entrapment that is selective about who among the natives it will elevate, and who it will suppress –let alone the conditions to qualify for selection.

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Why our education fails on its promise