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THE introduction of technical high schools, now being worked out in the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education, is a good way of making maximum use of limited resources to ensure that this option does exist and that boys and girls keen on technical careers have the chance to start early.

It is, oddly enough, not a new idea. Allan Wilson High School in Harare and Gifford High in Bulawayo were founded as technical high schools way back in colonial times for settler boys and their alumni numbered a lot of the engineers and most skilled artisans in colonial society.

Both had entrance examinations, since the competition for places was high.

They were converted to ordinary high schools during the Ian Smith era when it was announced that all boys high schools now had at least the minimum of woodwork and metalwork rooms and teachers and so schools were no longer needed.

To some degree that was true, but the general high schools did not have that technical culture.

The brightest third of the boys were never given the option of technical subjects, and had to take a solid block of pure academic subjects for O’ Level, even those keen on a future career in engineering.

The technical subjects were reserved for the less academic gifted, boys who would possibly not have to wear a suit and tie to work.

Girls, of course, were excluded totally from technical subjects. Their practical subjects were domestic science, basically cookery, and needlework, two subjects that were never offered to any boy. Again the bright girls did not do these subjects at O’ Level.

A lot of the decisions of who studied what subjects reflected the middle-class snobbery of England, although not so much of the rest of Britain, where there was a huge dividing line between those who wore white collars and sober ties to work and those who wore overalls and might get grease on their hands.

The white collar types were middle class and the overall types were working class, even if they were so skilled that they earned a lot more money.

This weird set of social and class attitudes came to Zimbabwe with the settlers and became embedded in our culture, which is one reason why technical subjects are not routine at all in our high schools.

The other is the cost, and these subjects can be expensive when you look at the equipment and the fact that the teachers need to be both skilled technicians, the sort of people who can get good jobs in industry, and skilled teachers.

So the present policy, of starting with one technical high school in each province, is a good starting point.

The addition that is needed, since some schools on the new list are boys-only high schools, is to make sure that girls can access the same lessons and subjects, which should be possible since where there are separate schools for boys and girls the girls school is just down the road, so they can come over for some  classes.

There is also a need to ensure that the crippling old concept, that technical subjects are for the second best pupils, is dumped from the very beginning and the original idea, that prospective pupils might have to sit an entrance examination or aptitude test, is used instead.

The range of subjects could be extended as well, with electronic engineering, for example, added.

Already ICT labs are going into far more schools, with the aim of making these universal as soon as possible, and the addition of hardware engineering for those labs should not be a major extra expense, especially when as time goes on there will automatically be faulty equipment and obsolete equipment that seem ideally designed for some practical training.

Modern Zimbabwe appears to be less crippled by that weird division between “white collar” and “technical specialists” but it still exists and the peculiar attitudes generated by the English class system really need to be eliminated.

In other cultures they are less important.

To take a couple of examples. Jack Welch, the former head of America’s General Electric, is rightly regarded as one of the top managers of the late 20th century.

He started his working life as a graduate in electrical engineering and after climbing that ladder for a while took his MBA, so he was doubly qualified.

But even when he was in the CEO office, he was running an engineering company, and could understand exactly what his engineers were telling him and give his own input on technical as well as financial and marketing considerations.

Britain, which initiated the industrial revolution, largely through self-taught engineers, fell back sharply when it was considered later on that others, people who had been to fancy private schools and knew zero engineering, then people who had qualified as accountants and never used a screwdriver, were obvious material for the top of top management.

The situation was different in Germany.

To this day the top slot in any engineering company is almost always reserved for an engineer who, along the way, has learned at least enough finance management to breathe over the shoulder of the finance officer along with other business skills.

Perhaps this is why Germany still has a large and flourishing engineering sector.

We even see this in Zimbabwe with a lot of those medium businesses that now tend to dominate our industrial sites.

When you visit you quite often find the owner or top manager is a technician or engineer, even if they wear a different coloured set of overalls to warn staff when they enter the factory floor that the boss is there, and who are quite capable of operating their equipment better than the people they hire and show them just what a skilled worker must be able to do.

These are the firms that survived the hyperinflation and dollarisation melt-downs.

Considering the needs of industry today, and the expansion that is likely in the future, it might be possible to accelerate the introduction of technical high schools and then extend the range of subjects in all high schools with help from the private sector.

Industrialists, or at least successful industrialists, realise the need for a full range of technical staff and staff who are comfortable in a technical environment.

So they might well want to help create that environment as early as possible so they can hire people later on who can do as well as pass exams; both are needed.