Educate the feet too: Uganda’s missing lesson of citizenship, service
A graduate with strong hands and a weak heart becomes efficient but untrustworthy. A graduate with a full head and idle feet becomes knowledgeable but absent, writes Barbara Kaija.
Barbara Kaija. (File)
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OPINION
Thank you, Dr Petero Wamala, for engaging so thoughtfully with my September 7 column, ‘What type of graduate does Uganda want?’ The nation needs more of these conversations if we are to move the education reform from good intentions to good outcomes.
I agree with your proposition. In addition to educating the head, the hands and the heart, the Ugandan education system must educate the feet too. I want to be careful not to let today’s emphasis read as a retreat from the other three. Holistic education is not a menu from which we pick a favourite; it is a single body.
A graduate with strong hands and a weak heart becomes efficient but untrustworthy. A graduate with a full head and idle feet becomes knowledgeable but absent. Uganda needs all four working together, which is why I emphasise today that as Uganda develops competency-based curricula for all education levels, the feet must not be quietly left out.
I want to be careful here, too, because this must not read as one more burden placed on the shoulders of the young. This is a generation that studied hard on our instruction, promised that a degree would open doors, a promise many have not seen kept. It would be unjust to now add “and also serve your country” as a final, unfunded demand, without first building the paths that make that service possible, visible and honourable. This responsibility rests on us: parents, educators and policy makers, before it lands on them.
True education
The habit of speaking of head, heart and hands traces back to the Swiss reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who insisted that true education develops the intellect, moral feelings and practical skill together. It was Mahatma Gandhi, through his philosophy of integrated basic education, Nai Talim, who pushed this triad further, down to the feet, arguing that education is not complete until the learner is willing to walk to the remote village and place their body, not only their ideas, in the service of the poorest.
Uganda already has a homegrown example of this instinct. The First Lady, Maama Janet Kataaha Museveni, has championed this cause through the Emerging Leaders Programme, a values-based initiative nurturing character and citizenship development in our schools, universities and tertiary institutions. Her ambition is an education policy that produces citizens who serve their communities, not credentialed graduates who serve only themselves. Uganda has, in fact, already built the beginnings of a national home for this philosophy. The National Secretariat for Patriotism Clubs, established under the Office of the President in 2009, co-ordinates patriotism clubs in post-primary schools and tertiary institutions across the country, with a mission to nurture disciplined, responsible and resourceful young citizens loyal to Uganda.
It is a good start, doing at national scale exactly what I am arguing our education philosophy should absorb everywhere: forming citizens who serve, not merely graduates who know. Its reach, though, is limited to its own clubs and calendar, not the ordinary classroom. The case is that the values it champions, patriotism, discipline and service, deserve to run through the ordinary curriculum too, so that educating the feet becomes every teacher’s business and not the work of one secretariat alone.
Feet that know where to stand
If patriotism, discipline and service are to run through the ordinary curriculum, they need a question of their own to organise teaching around, one that the head, the hands and the heart do not already ask. We have, rightly, spent years worrying about the head, the hands and the heart, yet the feet ask a different question entirely: where does this graduate go and for whom? A graduate’s feet are meant to carry her into her community: to a village council meeting, a parents’ committee, a polling station, a neighbour’s crisis. An education that never asks a young person to plant her feet somewhere in service of others has left the job half done, however impressive the transcript, skilled the hands or full the head.
This is the missing bridge I have tried to describe in earlier instalments of this column: the gap between knowing something and doing something useful with it, for someone other than oneself. Consider an accounting graduate who understands financial statements perfectly. Can she identify a struggling small trader, recognise the bookkeeping problem behind his stress and communicate how her knowledge could help?
The same question follows the agriculture graduate who spots a weakness in a food value chain, the engineer, the teacher, the social scientist. Dr Wamala calls this capacity knowledge activation: the ability to translate what one knows into useful action and real-world value. It shows up as problem recognition, initiative, communication, relationship building, resilience and the confidence to act without waiting indefinitely for someone else to provide the job.
A Solomon in every village
By educating the feet, our communities would develop faster. Our local councils would do far better than they currently do, and the structure is already in our favour. Villages are small and neighbours can easily work together for the common good. Citizens can be mobilised, without great expense, to dispose of their garbage responsibly, maintain their village roads and protect their sources of water. What is missing is not the structure. It is graduates with feet educated and activated enough to stand in that structure and lead.
Four dimensions
Solomon is what educated feet look like in a single village; the real task is to make that possible by design, for every graduate, not by chance, for the rare one. Seen this way, the graduate Uganda seeks has four dimensions, not three. Knowledge asks what this graduate knows. Competence asks what she can do. Character asks what kind of person we have formed. Activation asks the final, uncomfortable question: Can this graduate take what she knows and create value in the world, for someone other than herself?
Activation is not a demand that every graduate become an entrepreneur; an activated graduate may just as easily become an excellent teacher, employee, public servant or researcher. Its essential quality is agency, knowledge that has learned to walk: what I described earlier, borrowing Dr Wamala’s term, as knowledge activation.
By “graduate”, I do not mean only those who complete university but everyone who passes through the Ugandan education system, at whatever level they leave it. Every one of them should carry feet educated and activated in service of their community. That, more than any certificate, is the true mark of an education that has done its job.
This is why the feet cannot be treated as a fourth, optional priority, bolted on if resources allow. They test whether the head, the hands and the heart were ever really working together. A head full of knowledge, hands full of skill and a heart full of good character mean little to the widow whose borehole is broken, or the small trader whose books are in disarray, unless someone has feet to actually go there.
Dr Wamala’s response and this reply have together sketched the why. Next week, in the second half of this conversation, I turn to the how: What other nations have learned about building all four dimensions at once and the concrete shifts Uganda’s policymakers would need to make to educate the feet without losing the head, the hands or the heart.
The writer is an educationist, media communication specialist and the chairperson of the board of the Emerging Leaders’ Programme Kaijabarbara@gmail.com WhatsApp: 0708746624