B r i t a i n Z i m b a b w e S o c i e t y
OF Report Section 7
APPENDIX II
Issues and Challenges in the Education Sector
– The Zimbabwean Diaspora and its Dynamics.A Paper Prepared for the Britain Zimbabwe Society Open Forum 2006 by Raymond Majongwe (Progressive Teachers’ Union of Zimbabwe).
The political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe has not spared the education sector. We say this, not out of the habit to vilify our country. It is difficult to comprehend the crisis in the education sector using a reductionism approach. Thus, a holistic focus on the political and socio-economic context is critical when dissecting the immediate issues in the education system.
The issues are broad and thus this paper is not exhaustive; it seeks to provide insights into the subject. What follows is a cursory treatment of those issues that our Union find pertinent.
HIV and AIDS
Statistics show that Zimbabwe has one of the highest HIV and AIDS prevalence rates in the world. The education sector has been vulnerable to the impact of the epidemic and the crisis is many sided when it comes to schools. Students and teachers are either infected or affected by HIV and AIDS.
In the recently introduced pre-primary education programme known as Early Childhood Development (ECD) and the mainstream primary system, teachers are reporting disturbing cases of children showing signs of AIDS. This is also the case in secondary and tertiary institutions. We also have students whose parents are ill or have lost a parent or both parents due to AIDS. What is of concern to us is that as teachers we have not received any form of training to work with such children. We watch helplessly as the infected children are isolated by classmates and when in pain. Teachers need the skills to help them cope if the teaching-learning transaction is to be effective. The current state of knowledge on this matter is that teachers have to be trained as care givers and counsellors in order to work in a world with HIV and AIDS. The Basic Education Assistance Module (BEAM) introduced by government to pay fees for the AIDS orphans does not help much to liquidate the crisis. Despite, it’s a drop in the ocean and is distributed through political structures.
Currently there is no legal instrument in the public sector to institutionalize HIV and AIDS as workplace issues. Teachers have no access to ARVs. This is in spite of the fact that we constitute the largest group contributing to the AIDS Fund through a monthly levy. The disbursement of the Fund has also been politicized. Teachers in bad shape due to the disease cannot go on early retirement because terminal benefits are threatened with inflation and cannot sustain them during their time of dire need. They soldier on in front of our students who are likely to be emotionally affected by their suffering teacher. Our students have also suffered from teacher absenteeism and tardiness due to illness. The sick leave costs are becoming an increasing burden on government. Students are still short changed as replacement teachers for those on sick leave are untrained.
As PTUZ we have started to appeal to philanthropic organizations for funds to roll out a programme where teachers receive ARVs and are trained to work in schools ravaged with HIV and AIDS. We stand guided by a widely shared view that there is a strong association between poverty and HIV and AIDS. Given that teachers in Zimbabwe have tested poverty positive most are likely to test HIV positive.
Low Teacher Morale
Conditions of work in the education sector are deplorable. Teachers, School Heads and Education Officers all earn salaries that are below the PDL. On average a teacher takes home a monthly salary of $25 000 against a PDL pegged at $96 000 per family of six. Teachers are no longer creditworthy and cannot purchase, even through installment schemes, items like TV sets and refrigerators. These now costs an average of $300 000. Given that motivation is contagious, we do not see how teachers can exploit their raw energies and motivate the learners. Our schools are manned by dispirited personnel and affected by brain flight. Experienced teachers are now a rare species.
The absence of social dialogue in the education sector and the use of negative authority have also helped in lowering the morale of teachers. For instance, government has introduced Public Service Inspectors. The Inspectorate does not aid in the professional growth of teachers. Instead, they use threats and intimidation to ensure policy compliance. The world has heard that in Zimbabwe, school children fill in forms designed by government, where children assess teachers every term. This is the boiling point of negative authority and the work of small minds in big offices. It is a practice which is not grounded in any sound management science.
What Zimbabwe needs is to strengthen the Quality Control Division so that we have Education Officers who can advise teachers on pedagogy and facilitate collegiality among teachers. Use of negative authority on a demoralized workforce only helps to alienate teachers from their job. In light of this, harmonization of labour laws in the country is of immediate necessity. This will provide a platform for social dialogue and complementary partnership between teachers and government. Debate bordering on such issues is highly commendable.
Another disturbing factor is the politicization of appointments to administrative posts. Most School Heads, District and Provincial Education Officers play political roles. They extort money from teachers to fund political holidays. When a party card becomes part to one’s CV in public sector employment what ensues is crisis of loyalty. We believe our allegiance should be to the state and not to a political formation. Depoliticizing the education system can be regarded as an effort towards professionalizing the teaching community.
High Cost of Education
The direct and indirect costs of education for the average family have become astronomical. Such a scenario is always a fertile ground for low completion rates, high grade repetition and dropout rates. Issues of equity in access and equality of opportunity then come to the fore. In Zimbabwe, we have disproportionately few students from poor families in educational institutions. This is conspicuous at the level of Higher Education largely as a result of inequalities at the lower levels of education and a shift towards private purchase of schooling.
Government has given a protectionist response to the crisis. The Education Act has been amended to give the Minister of Education powers to control and criminalize unsanctioned hikes in school fees. The standing policy provides that the movement in school fees should be linked to the Consumer Price Index. We shudder to ask if this index is the best model to use. First, the consumer basket has a plethora of items that have nothing to do with education. Second, equipment and chemical reagents for science education have a foreign currency component in them. The weakening of our currency has a glaring bearing on the provision of quality science and technical-vocational education. We need to underscore that companies in the business of importing educational materials have no easy access to foreign currency. This is one area in which Zimbabweans in the Diaspora can seek investment opportunities in.
In our prognosis, the issues are about how education should be funded and made affordable to the poor and not using the leverage of the law. We need a Zimbabwe where the rich and the poor alike enjoy learning under comparably the same conditions. The poor cannot fund quality education. More so, unlike in the past, parents now sponsor the whole spectrum of education from Pre-primary to Higher and Tertiary education with little assistance from the taxpayer’s money.
Poor Quality Instruction
Quality education can be regarded as a measure of the concentration of resources per learner. With the high costs of education earlier on alluded to and 80% of the citizens living below the poverty datum line, pedagogical materials are in short supply. Just to offer some insights into the depth of the crisis; our survey has shown that the basic textbook kit averages $50 000 per learner in the primary sector. Most schools administer mid-year and end of year examinations which are written by the teacher on the chalkboard. There are no textbooks in schools.
Compounding the poor quality of tuition is the absence of benchmarks to provide the minimum amount of materials required for schools to function. It seems to suggest that a school in Zimbabwe is a place with structures called classrooms and a group of beings called teachers and nothing more. Parents are empowered to determine the level of fees. Communities charge what they can afford. Consequently, some schools are well resourced and others are not. This has led to a situation where some schools produce rulers and others followers.
The Vocationalization Wave
Zimbabweans generally agree that the education system has to be vocationalized as evident from the submissions to the 1999 Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Education and Training ordinarily referred to as the Nziramasanga Commission. There is now a policy seeking to create a vocational pathway and an academic pathway after two years of lower secondary education. While we lend our support to genuine efforts seeking to transform our education system, we remain sceptical about the intentions of government. The government has claimed that this will reduce unemployment. Government is implying that the problem of unemployment is an educational one rather than an economic one for obvious political reasons. It may be a strategy to shunt our children into the informal sector which most governments have regarded as a labour sponge with an infinite capacity to take all on board. We all know in the majority of cases informal employment just places a person between employment and unemployment and vulnerable. Now we shudder to ask: Whose child should be educated for the informal economy and whose should be catapulted into the formal sector employment?
A nation of Children with Parents Abroad
Zimbabwe has an employment problem. I call it an employment problem because the issue is not just unemployment, but there is also lack of jobs of the sort that provides enough income to sustain a decent standard of living. This has led to many to work in the Diasporas or engage in cross boarder trading. Consequently, the family unit has fragmented and this has seen the emergence of an e-family where face to face communication between parent and child has been replaced by the internet and other forms of telecommunication traffic.
Although no researches have been conducted to help crystallize our speculations, teachers are reporting that indiscipline in schools is worsening and a good number of students are not educationally well-focused. This is attributed to lack of parental guidance. A good percentage of our children are now in charge of their siblings or under the guardianship of relatives. None of these will squarely replace a biological parent. But with the employment problem, Zimbabweans have a hard choice to make, stay home and face a starving family or to migrate to greener and freer pastures and leave some other persons shape the behaviour of their children. The challenge for those at home and abroad is to start to fund and engage in research efforts targeting to establish if there is any association between indiscipline in schools and the phenomenon of a nation of children with parents abroad. The Zimbabwean Diaspora has to establish direct links with schools where their children are attending in order to get a first hand and faithful account of how they are behaving.
The Way Forward
Zimbabwe needs a sector-specific response strategy to the HIV and AIDS challenge in the Education Ministries. Zimbabweans in the Diasporas can offer financial and non-financial assistance.
- Our teachers need access to ARVs to prolong their lives and teaching contact time with the learners. Our Union is already levying teachers through their subscriptions and buying ARVs to its infected members. The fund is however limited.
- Labour laws governing teachers must be amended to embrace the philosophy of work place social democracy. Experts in this field can build alliances with teacher organisations and equip them with knowledge and strategies to navigate this journey.
- More funds have to be mobilized to resource the education in disadvantaged communities. The well being of the education sector in part lies in depoliticizing the sector.
- The Zimbabwe family abroad should consider investing in business concepts that help to improve our education.
- Zimbabwe to commit itself to genuine education reforms. The purity of government’s intentions in vocationalizing education needs public scrutiny otherwise it is the blame-the-victim kind of strategy.
Thank You. Raymond Majongwe
( General Secretary – Progressive Teachers Union of Zimbabwe )Top of Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Next Page
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