What is the purpose of Education?

By Modern Musiimenta Karema

Once upon a time, there was a monkey that wanted to be the greatest monkey in the world. It told its parents of this ambition and they were very thrilled by the ambition of the baby monkey. So when it was young, they procured the services of the greatest trainers in the world to ensure that it gets top-notch training to be the greatest monkey in any forest. It would thrive in any forest it was sent to.

The trainers of the young monkey took it through a very intensive swimming course. For 20 years, the monkey was taken through all the styles of swimming-from breaststroke to front crawl, from freestyle to backstroke, from butterfly to side stroke. In all assessments that it did on all the styles of swimming, it came out top of the class. It would indeed be the greatest monkey in the world.

And then it was sent to the forest.

For the young monkey that had been top of the swimming class, the first shock of its post-training life was that there were no water bodies in the forest to implement its acquired skills. It realised albeit a little late that the trainers had prepared it for the wrong environment. It realised that the skills set it had were not relevant for the life it was leading in the forest. It realised that for it to survive and thrive and be the greatest in the forest, it required a different skill set than what it had acquired in its 20 years of training. On the other hand, its trainers were shocked at the fact that their top students couldn't perform to the utmost in the forest. The parents were disgusted that after 20 years of paying for their child to get skills and be the greatest in the forest and bring honour to the family, the child had ended up useless and had to return home and depend on them for survival since baby monkey had no idea what it took to be a great monkey in the forest.

The analogy above represents the dilemma of education in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The major purpose of education is to prepare society with skills to survive, thrive and contribute to community development. The needs of the 18^th century agrarian Africa were survival against military attacks by neighbouring kingdoms and a thriving economy-agriculture, hunting and nomadic pastoralism. That explains why the education system then was mainly tailored to having all able-bodied youths trained on basic military skills so that they could assemble an army once attacked by neighbouring kingdoms. On the economic front, youths from pastoralist families were trained on how to graze cattle and defend them against attacks by wild animals.

The youths from farming families were instructed on the best practice on farming, harvesting and how to always stash away part of the harvest for a rainy day-famine and drought. This explains why a family's wealth was measured by the number of granaries it had. All these values were passed over from generation to generation through systems including folk songs, and community values and rules and regulations.

The education system of the 18^th century was, therefore, physical-having the physical skills to solve the day to day problems of the society and make it survive and thrive. The needs of the 19th and 20th centuries changed the training that was needed to survive, thrive and contribute to community development. With the advent of colonialism in the bigger part of Africa (except Ethiopia), the new environment required a new education system to prepare children that would be relevant for that society.

The major aim of the education system introduced by the colonialists across Africa was to create a workforce that would be central in setting up and enforcing the colonial machinery. The major products of that system were the public and civil services-teachers, clerks, policemen and women, soldiers, and administrative persons from the village to the national level. The education system was, therefore, knowledge based-because that was what was required to contribute to the colonial project.

The 21^st century came with its own needs. There are no more wild animals to fight, no more neighbouring kingdoms to attack, and the colonial project ended. As a result, the public and civil services can no longer employ the bulk of the graduates out of universities. The challenge is that even with this clear change in the needs of society, most of Africa's education systems are still using the knowledge-based curricula introduced by the colonial governments-albeit with some modifications.

As a result, just like the monkey in the analogy above, the products of this education system are finding themselves increasingly irrelevant for the post-school life, the parents that have invested a lot of money in these children are overwhelmed by the fact that their children are irrelevant after years of training, and governments are flabbergasted at the high unemployment rates in their countries, and they have no idea where they went wrong. Society is stuck with a workforce that has gone through 20 years of training but has no idea how they can contribute to that society's development.

The African Development Bank in its 2013 report says that 90% of kids in Africa that go through the education system will end up in the informal sector. The International Labour Organisation in its 2017 report brings the figure a little lower to 85.8% and defines the informal sector to include agriculture. In effect, this means that 9 out of the 10 kids in a classroom won't get a formal job. This is because ‘formal' was a concept of the 20th-century colonial period, not the 21^st. The question that educationists, policy makers, and civil society should be asking themselves is how is our education system preparing these kids to survive, thrive and contribute to their family's and community's development through the informal sector? How relevant is the knowledge-based curriculum in producing kids that will thrive in an economy that isn't job-based? If the education system is churning out products that are irrelevant for the needs of the society, is it a solution or a potential time bomb? Is the Arab spring a result of having a well-learned youth that has nothing to do?

The answer to all these is in reforming what children are taught (curriculum content) and how it is taught (pedagogy). The 21^st century is a skill/ competency-based century and therefore it requires a competency-based curriculum to produce a competent graduate. It is not just about acquiring the knowledge of marketing and passing an exam with an A, but rather about acquiring the skill of marketing so that once you go to the real world, you have what it takes to survive, and thrive in marketing your products from your small or medium-sized enterprise. This would solve the problem of graduates with first-class degrees in marketing who can't sell or market a product, or graduates in education who have no skill in classroom control or child counselling and mentorship.

The education systems in African countries (both curriculum and pedagogy) need to interest themselves in skilling students with 21st-century skills (also known as life skills), so that when they graduate, they are a solution to society's problems and vessels of community and national development, not a potential time bomb. These skills include (but are not limited to) public speaking, confidence, social responsibility, creativity, networking, critical thinking, teamwork, perseverance, and many others.

Important to note however is the fact that teachers cannot teach and impart life skills if the national assessment systems and practices are not assessing how the students are acquiring these skills. It is therefore paramount that the assessment systems are restructured to ensure that there is continuous (formative) and summative assessment of scholars by schools.

Once schools know that these skills are being assessed by the relevant bodies, then they will ensure that they actively teach the children the same. With the liberalisation of the education sectors in most African countries, teachers teach to the exam. So if the skills are being examined, then they will teach them to our kids.

The development of a nation is as good as the quality of its human resources. The quality of human resources is as good as its education system. The quality of the education system is as good as answering the question what does society need and how am I producing people that deal with that need?

If we as nations do not deal with these very important questions, then our very good national strategic plans that are meant to take us from low to middle-income countries will remain on paper. Just like the monkey in the analogy above, our kids will complete 20 years of education and sit at home to feed on what is left of the parents' sweat, the parents will be disgusted at the loss incurred in educating an irrelevant generation, and governments will be flabbergasted at the apparent unemployment figures in their national statistics.

The reason for the statistics is very simple-they are unemployed because they were not meant to be employed in the first place. That is 20th-century reasoning being carried forward to the 21^st century. The question is-is our education system creating a product that is relevant for the 21^st century?

The writer is the head of programme implementation at the Educate