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Salarygate, the chief executive monster of all malfeasances, ratifies C. S Lewis’s observation that education without values only makes man a cleverer devil

Stanely Mushava Literature Today
Book: The Quality of Citizenship Education in Harare
Author: Oswell NamasasuPublisher: Scholars’ Press (2013)

Zimbabwe’S educational panels need to touch base and perform again. Our schools need to correct their slanted emphasis on education which teaches citizens how to make a living not how to live.

While education is inestimable, it is bound to falter off the mark when it exclusively majors with building students into able entrepreneurs and profitable workers not wiser and better citizens.

Aristotle observes that educating the mind without educating the heart is not education at all. It is this comprehensive approach which must be streamlined into our schools.

Education that does not nurture students into socially and morally responsible citizens is fundamentally void, whatever the purported benefits are.

We must disinvest concentration from troubleshooting problems and forestall them through quality citizenship education.
Citizenship education is an interdisciplinary body of knowledge on civil roles within the political, economic, social, ecological and cultural context of a country.

In Zimbabwe, it is transmitted at elementary level through Social Studies and in tertiary modules like Peace, Leadership and Conflict Transformation; and National Strategic Studies.

Social engines such as media, church and family are important for developing identity consciousness and responsibility in citizens but schools have the potential to offer integrative citizenship education programmes which are not skewed along special interests.

Zimbabwe has antithetical attributes as one of the most educated and one of the most corrupt countries on the continent. If our degrees and diplomas unquestioningly co-exist with depravity, then we will do better to shape-shift our curricula for civic and ethical rigour.
Leadership deficit and moral bankruptcy are currently staple fare in the corporate world even as education remains the principal management criterion.

That companies have been run down by men and women of unimpeachable academic credentials, some of them even doctors, shows something to be fundamentally haywire with our education.

Salarygate, the chief executive monster of all malfeasances, ratifies C. S . Lewis’s observation that education without values only makes man a cleverer devil. Our most educated citizens have been abdicating duty and hopping from one board to another with thoughtless glee on plundering sprees. There should be a missing dimension.

Dr Oswell Namasasu’s recently published study “The Quality of Citizenship Education in Harare” has pertinent serving suggestions.
Based on the researcher’s investigation of the quality of citizenship education in Harare, the book incriminates the poor implementation of citizenship education as the cause of deviance among the youths, and ultimate civic dysfunction in the country.

While Namasasu researched with particular attention on the teaching of Social Studies in primary schools, his target segment is fair enough given the Solomonic nugget that when a child is trained the way he should go he will not depart from it when he is old.

Some psychologists concur that the mind becomes “set in its ways” in early youth hence the need for proper training in early stages of development.

The book endorses the current Social Studies curriculum as having considerable potential for citizenship education but faults implementation which the researcher says is distorted through textbook writing and over-reliance on inadequate textbooks as teaching aids in the classroom without significant references to actual environments in which students live.

Namasasu recommends the updating of the 1982 Social Studies syllabus which is still in use today to incorporate trending features in Zimbabwe since the time. He argues that the curriculum does not need a complete overhaul, as some scholars suggest, as entirely discarding it equates throwing away the baby with the bathwater.

Aside balancing tradition with trends, there is need to redress a situation encountered among several teachers who base the success of the education system on passes in final exams not the values, qualities and attitudes children leave school.

A typical response from teachers was “If you want good results, stick to the textbook.”
As long as the emphasis is on passing, children will memorise citizenship education for good grades and forget it as soon as they leave the exam room.

Teachers must be resident visionaries who equip students with what it takes to add value to their country not just to move to the next level.

The viral incidence of anti-social behaviour such as racism, xenophobia, murder, vandalism, rape and assault among youths worldwide comes into play to qualify the case for citizenship education.

Locally, cases of bullying and gender related violence in schools are on the rise. Prince Edwards is one mini trouble spot where prefects wantonly bully and sometimes severely assault younger pupils.

There have been several reports about young girls being gang-raped by male colleagues at schools.
At the school I attended, there were cases of girls as young as 15 escaping from guarded hostels at night for sexcapades with cab drivers in the nearby growth point.

There were expulsions of teenage boys hooked on cannabis and alcohol. Such deviance is going commonplace among our schools.
Given such backgrounds, it is not surprising that our universities are among biggest fermenting grounds for sexually transmitted infections. The same students who bag distinctions for sophisticated modules are on course to make a living do not know how to live.

When they graduate into industry, equipped intelligent about their livelihoods and ignorant about their lives, they will only refrain from unethical behaviour not because of integrity but lack of opportunity.

It is an observable cycle.
Upon elevation to chief executive officers and board chairs, they pay for girlfriends’ accommodation in expensive hotels all year round from mining tender scams or write laws which make it legally acceptable to feast off money meant for workers’ remuneration and quality assurance.

I have seen professed intellectuals with a command of political language heaping obscene abuses on anyone who does not share their opinion on social networks; a clear reflection of ignorance and arrogance.

“Public spiritedness and civic virtues such as doing something for common good and concern for public infrastructure seem to be fast disappearing,” writes Namasasu.

There is nothing particular about high profile scandals. They simply reflect on a public pedestal the depravity of the society from which leaders emerge.

Vandalism and theft in public telephone booths, street-name signposts, bus stop signs, roofing sheets in public termini, electric cables and oil from transformers and electric power sub-stations is taken for a symptom of lack of proper education.

The cynical ascription of such delinquency to a poor economy and unemployment is short-circuited on the grounds a civic-minded person cannot strip national assets for short-term individual gain as held by the Shona proverb which says one does not marry off his mother in order to cash in on the marriage dowry.

The loud and clear call is more imperative now than ever. Morality is in short supply and our schools have work to do. Ideas in the classroom, as Lyndon B. Johnson once said shape the world better than state agenda.

President Robert Mugabe weighs in with a pertinent observation from a 2006 ZBC newscast in response to a question on whether Zimbabwe’s moral fibre is failing: “That is a question you and I should answer, our families and the parents should answer that question; managers in business should answer that question.

“Yes I think there is a lot of rotten fibre… all is not lost of course, but the frequency, the incidence of corruption must worry everybody, everybody wherever we are… it’s happening quite frequently, theft in business, theft and corruption in Government… Let’s all work to revive our morality now.”

The loud and clear call is more imperative now than ever. Morality is in short supply and our schools have work to do. Ideas in the classroom, as Lyndon B. Johnson once said shape the world better than state agenda.