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At the Gallery
The Zimbabwean dispensation is greatly in need of employment creation opportunities and skills development and as such, the national curriculum plays a central role in developing the right human resource base that incorporates theoretical knowledge, mental aptitude and psycho-motor experience.

Of note is the fact that employment opportunities for the vast amount of graduates from the country’s leading institutions are not guaranteed employment once they leave school, which brings to question the practicality of a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) geared Curriculum.

Arguably, the world’s major economies have STEM oriented curricula and overall, the output of professional artists is to a greater extent thwarted by the need for skilled engineers, technicians and scientists; this can be identified through the stable functioning of Western economies and the ability to keep industry, which is the main economic tenet in developed countries. In Zimbabwe, any move towards keeping the curriculum STEM oriented is justifiable as the need to boost agricultural production and resuscitate industry far outweighs what is deemed in local contexts as somewhat, a luxurious sector.

There may perhaps be a need for exactitude, that arts be included in the national curriculum as a means to encourage learner’s ability to create. The thrust to the inclusion of arts is based on the mind’s perceptual approach to learning as in infancy, the creative aspect is unhampered. As the infant grows, this inventive approach to life moves towards a point when, upon entering school, learning by rote stifles all aspects of creativity. The arts are at this point presented in an extracurricular manner and do not have any attachment to syllabus, hence in the learner’s perception, become a trivial pursuit. At this point, the rote approach enforces STEM as the be all and end all of every learner’s educational journey – a dogma towards becoming a doctor or engineer pronounces any other pursuit, possibly creative, as failure and of no importance to the economy.

The National Gallery of Zimbabwe has through the years trained many successful artists who contribute to the fiscus by contributing to revenue streams both locally and on export of their creative output.

The trivial angle that arts are viewed by the STEM driven curriculum turns a blind eye on any advance which is brought through this income generation and droves of practicing artists find their ability to trade on the international platform stunted as the individuals responsible for taxation, to a large extent underestimate the input and processing costs of the Creative process, eventually leading to the inability to make profits by the Artist.