By Tsaac Tibasiima
Africa-Press – Cape verde. A new curriculum is confusing policy makers, school administrators, students, teachers, and parents alike. School visitation days that look like extravagant wedding parties that the Ministry of Education is struggling to regulate. Private helicopters, luxury cars, and showy dresses in which our partying high school students look like Hollywood celebrities at the Grammy Awards. Disgruntled teachers of Arts subjects that government is unable to pay as generously as their colleagues who teach Science subjects.
Forced closures of hundreds of schools across the country. Controversial rankings of our institutions that have the whole country talking. Things that point to a number of difficult questions: What is education for life? Why is it important? Where do students find it? How do parents, schools, and teachers know they are giving it? How do students know that they are receiving it? Education for Life answers these and similar questions. Competently edited by this writer and produced by Marianum Press, the book is a collection of reflective stories of how old students of St Kizito SS, Kabowa, found education for life at the school in the 1990s and 2000s (without even knowing it at the time).
The co-authors—now responsible young adults and rising professionals in various fields worldwide—powerfully reminisce their experiences of acquiring what they now recognise as education for life. Witty, and nostalgic, their highs, lows, escapades, and the way the school, led by its illustrious founding head teacher, Dr John Baptist Mpoza, used them to impart priceless values, knowledge, skills and attitudes are strikingly relatable. Indeed, students, parents, teachers, school leaders, and education policy persons will find the book a useful resource.
Education for Life compares with John 1:46. It says: “Nazareth!” exclaimed Nathanael. “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” Like Nazareth, this book is about Kabowa: a small school in a seedy Kampala suburb that produced big results. And like Philip in inviting Nathanael to come and see, the co-authors invite us to see these results. Results that some bigger, better-known, schools are failing to achieve.
What is Education for Life?
According to J. Donald Walter, “Any educational system that teaches only job skills or offers only intellectual information is neglecting the essential needs of human beings…We deeply need proper training in “how-to-live” skills such as how to find the right mate, how to raise our children, how to be a good employee, how to get along with our neighbors, and how to concentrate our minds so that we can draw success into all our endeavors…Education for Life is a system that prepares the child to face the challenges of living as a human being, and helps him [her] to achieve balance and harmony in all he [she] does.” And according to the co-authors of this book, this is what they got from their school in Kabowa.
Of course, memoirs are notorious for selective memory and exaggeration. However, in Education for Life, the co-authors disinterestedly and candidly (perhaps naively) narrate the events of their childhood as they happened, leaving the reader to reach his/ her own conclusions. In this review, I discuss one of my conclusions from reading the book. The conclusion that more than the memoirs its co-authors call it, the book is a call to remember the good old school that educated learners for life. The school we are losing by uncritically settling for profit, quick fixes, technology, and fashions whose benefits will not last as long as their adverse effects. Although the book is not a collection of prescriptions per se, it shines a light on five alternatives to values and practices that are failing us:
For life
The co-authors describe, like J. Donald Walter, a school that looked farther than grades and emphasized the holistic formation of students for life: Strict discipline, vision, self-care, spiritual growth, integrity, teamwork, leadership, followership, sports, the performing arts, and community service. A school where students successfully did all their housekeeping under the supervision of their fellow students. A school where “some students joined without any cooking skills but they left the school almost as professional chefs…” A school that enabled students to acquire “vital survival life skills.” Attributing their success to this school system, the co-authors powerfully rebut today’s permissiveness, indolence, generative artificial intelligence, and other forms of unfair advantage in schools and homes that some see wrongly as ‘modernity’.
Teachers were truly teachers
The co-authors describe undergoing the care of committed teachers who taught, guided, counseled, and mentored them—over and above the call of duty—despite meagre pay and dismal working conditions. Looking at the ongoing headache concerning teachers’ salaries, the book inclines me to believe that President Museveni should catch up with Dr. Mpoza and ask him in today’s speak: okikola otya? Alternatively, the President should grab a copy of the book and see how Dr. Mpoza pulled off the teachers’ commitment without needing to rob a bank.
A school, not a shop
As our schools are expanding endlessly and the phrase “Registration in Progress” is a permanent feature on their signposts, the co-authors describe a school that remained small by choice. Small enough for the head teacher to reach every student in person.
The co-authors demonstrate that marketization does not have to force its perverted ideals on us. Their educational experience and resultant success bear proof that a school that was born during the neoliberalism of the 1990s can look beyond making money, do the right things, and still succeed. Simply put, the co-authors demonstrate that commercialization of education need not be accepted as expedient, let alone inevitable.
Education was redemptive
As prioritising applicants with 4s in admissions and selling students who have paid fees for years but are not expected to excel on national examinations have become standard operating procedure, “St. Kizito was open and welcoming, not prioritizing the most gifted learners, but had a special programme for the academically, socially and disciplinary struggling/ weak students.” The school did not only give failing students who were kicked out of other schools second chances. It also had a system that ensured that those second chances worked for the students.
“That system converted 3rd and 4th grades at PLE into first grades at O-Level. It was still the same system that converted students who were considered failures elsewhere into disciplined and now respected and successful adults in our society.” For all the important things our schools don’t do citing lack of resources, the co-authors provide a compelling refutation. By their admission, their school’s infrastructure was underwhelming (in some areas nonexistent). However, that they have returned in praise of the outcomes of what was little to nothing is edifying: in education, infrastructure is necessary but is not the critical factor for success.
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Via a rich range of curricula and co-curricular learning experiences, the students were inspired (rather than forced) to stay on side. They were groomed in the values they needed to do so: Integrity, good judgment, and self-control—assets with which they went into the world and because of which they are succeeding as citizens, parents, professionals, and entrepreneurs. Yet, in many schools today, infrastructure is pursued aggressively, often without substance.
Source: Daily Monitor
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