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A Zimbabwean classroom
HARARE - President Robert Mugabe’s government is revamping the education system, which experts say is colonial-based and out of sync with Zimbabwean ideals.
This comes exactly a month after ZimRights held a series of provincial conferences where education experts called on Mugabe’s administration to revamp the education system.
And yesterday, Education minister, Lazarus Dokora, announced his ministry will hold public consultations to review the education curriculum.
“Guided by the need for a new, fit-for-purpose curriculum, the ministry will lead a process of public consultations to obtain views or inputs of the entire nation, on Friday 28 November 2014,” Dokora said in a statement.
“Consultations will be conducted at every school, and there will be a consultation centre in each district and province as well as national consultation level. Please, seize the chance to input the kind of knowledge, skills, values and attitudes that our new curriculum should impact to graduates of the school system.”
The review comes as education experts crank up pressure on Dokora to review the curriculum.
As reported by the Daily News, twice in October, there have been growing calls for Mugabe’s government to bin the archaic and colonial education system which is blamed for the poor pass rate that has continued to stalk Zimbabwe’s education.
Borniface Chisaka, director of research at the Zimbabwe Open University (Zou), warned last month that without revamping the education system, including educating teachers, standards will continue to plummet.
“At the time of independence, the colonial government was training teachers. We appeared to have continued training,” Chisaka told the delegates to the ZimRights Mashonaland West provincial people’s conference in Chinhoyi.
“This was a British colonial system and we have maintained that. We are training people on the job not teaching people on the job. When you train people you are inviting lots of problems; because people behave in the manner they were trained, they don’t think and they don’t adapt.”
Since independence, Zimbabwe’s pass rate has ranged between a paltry 18-25 percent.
ZimRights is holding 10 provincial meetings with a view to interrogate socio-economic and cultural rights against the new Constitution, bill of rights and government economic blueprint ZimAsset.
So far, the revamp of the education curriculum has dominated the meetings held in Mashonaland West and Masvingo provinces.
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