Some Reflections on Our Education Systems

Education must aid in the transformation of the Ethiopian society, by playing a vital role in the lives of all citizens. To do this, the present educational system must be restructured and changed. Education must be conceived in its broadest connotation to include all non-formal and formal learning experiences. It must take advantage of new technology, and of social and religious institutions, so that education can be delivered to the Ethiopian population as a whole. [Recommendation of the 1972 Sector Review]

It is essential to develop a culture of inquiring the status of our education system as something wrong goes in other sectors. In recent postings on this forum, I read a couple of articles criticizing our education system triggered by some ‘problems’ in the Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation. Logically, it could be possible to make a sort of cause (problem in the education system) and effect (limitations in running ETC) relationship. Nevertheless, it requires an expert knowledge and experience as well as sufficient background information to come to this kind of correlation, if there is any. It would require one to pinpointing the weakest link in the education system that is attributable to the problems in the Telecommunications Corporation.

Before forwarding my reflections about some problems of Ethiopia’s education, I chose to provide the following points. The critics about the education system (or any system or policy for that matter) can be grouped as follows: (a) critics from well informed nonpartisan experts, (b) critics from well informed partisan experts, (c) critics from nonpartisan laymen, and (d) critics from partisan laymen. Responses toward critics from laymen have to focus on informing the real cause of their displeasure (on the system). I will try to do that.

Sooner or later, Ethiopia shall have relatively better education system that can address the demands of most of the various sectors of the society. However, she will never have a ‘perfect’ education system that pleases everybody. It will be the responsibility of Ethiopian scientists and educators to research and evaluate, and make constructive critics to bring the education system into some sort of comparable perfection. The education system will only develop through research, evaluation and accommodations of research findings and recommendations. Therefore, it should be clear to all of us that, regardless of any positive developments that can be made apparent at any given time, there will be critics for obvious reasons.

Critics of any sort have to be used as milieu for discussions and sharing of ideas. Based on this premise, I am going to discuss some of the problems of our education system and provide my reflections on the critics, recommendations and suggestions provided by some writers on the issue. To begin with, I would like to summarize the major problems of our education system as follows.

Historically, the Ethiopian secular education is founded on a package of imported curriculum—imported content, imported practice, imported personnel, and imported language of instruction. Moreover, even though Emperor Menelik’s commitment and efforts of modernizing Ethiopia would have been realized through educating citizens in the sciences and technical fields, probably, against his expectation the secular education of that time had been focusing on training bureaucrats. Here we have two important problems: (1) we begun with imported curriculum which ended up training bureaucrats, and (2) this tendency prevails till now. (I would like to make clear that adapting some components of education systems of other nations is acceptable as far as the components are contextualized through language and culture.)

Economic incapability to finance our education system remains to be the major hurdle throughout its 100-years history. The lack of adequate financing leads to shortage of educational facilities, shortage of qualified personnel (teachers, school administrators, college professors, researchers, etc), and limitations in the quality of the curricula and curricular materials. Thus, providing quality education to every school age Ethiopian child is yet a dream. The quantitative expansion of our education set forth during the 1950s is still an unfinished business. Currently, it goes as far as running mobile schools in our pastoral communities. I hope the quantitative expansion to reach every corner of the Nation will not take more years. Nonetheless, as long as we don’t have the economic capacity to finance our education system, problems of quality will remain as issue. The point of argument has to be whether there is adequate progress or not.

Language of instruction is another problem of Ethiopia’s education system. It is as old as the history of Ethiopia’s secular education. It is the resultant of the imported curriculum. Our longstanding endogenous education systems did not evolve into modern secular education. From the point of view of educators, language of instruction contextualizes and culturizes education. A learner will have difficulty to make connections between school knowledge and real-life experiences when s/he learns through non-native language. However, though the problem of language of instruction remains to be an important issue that needs to be solved, it is not as simple as telling a prime minister to do something about it. It is not a problem that can be fixed as simple as that. There should exist some driving forces: economic and technological developments, and sociopolitical empowerment of the Ethiopian populace. Even under such circumstances, it is a remote possibility for us to use our languages in colleges and universities.

Lack of context for learning is a key problem in our education system. I have tried to indicate that language contextualizes education. Likewise, tools, technical facilities, and exposure to real operational facilities will help learners contextualize theoretical knowledge in science and technology. Our schools, colleges, and universities give comparably outstanding theoretical education in science and technical fields. It is clear that we don’t have enough contexts to support theoretical education. An American graduate of telecommunications engineering would be exposed to extensive in field training before touching a bolt in the actual business. The colleges and universities in the US have more or less the same tradition of preparing graduates as Ethiopian colleges and universities. But Ethiopian graduates are not exposed to extensive hands-on experiences during the course of their education and after they are employed. (In fact, on the average, students joining Ethiopian colleges and universities are more outstanding and genius. This may be because we enroll the most outstanding ones from a relatively large pool of high school graduates).

The lack of context for creativity and innovation is an important problem I would like to mention here. Education systems of Ethiopia never failed to make some attempts to promote creativity and innovation. Nevertheless, neither the Ethiopian society encourages creativity/innovation nor the contexts for creativity/innovation are available. One of the challenges of secular education during its inception was that most Ethiopians had negative attitudes towards skilled manual labor, which I believe had prevailed till the late 1970s. This was the major obstacle to fostering creativity. Secondly, there was a tendency by Ethiopian graduates to seek for white-collar jobs throughout the years. It is a new phenomenon to see Ethiopian architects running their own business. When I come the second problem, we witness the lack of industrial and technological development as well as market drive that demand creativity and innovation. Economic development leads to industrial and technological development, which in turn demands skilled, creative, and innovative taskforce. This drives us to develop our education system to support the overall National development. When the education system fails to respond to such kind of demand, we may call it dysfunctional.

Having said these let me make some comments about any perceived or tangible limitations of our tertiary education graduates (engineers, agriculturalists, physicians, etc) and the recommended solution to abate the limitations.

It would be unfair to say our engineers’ technical limitations are attributable to limitations in communicating in English. The important point about our engineers (and other professionals at this level and above) is not how they communicate. It is how they think. Their profession requires them to be engaged in a lot of minds-on activities rather than mere communication like reading manuals to operate or install a machine. When people are engaged in some sort of minds-on activities, they employ their native languages anyways, thus language will not be important. They simply think in their own language. An Amharic speaking engineer will not close his eyes and say ‘I think I can fix this problem using that formula’. He would rather close his eyes and say ‘ይህ ችግር ያንን ቀመር በመጠቀም የምፈታው ይመስለኛል’. [He would think in Amharic]. The source of limitations on the part of our engineers, if any, must be somewhere else. Personally, I don’t believe that language of instruction in schools to be a big problem to professionals of this level.

I have tried to indicate the limitations of our education system in providing context for learning in general and creativity and innovation in particular. That is, our geniuses have little or no exposure to real-life settings as students, and most of the time they are not provided with on-the-job training as new employees. Limitations in our professionals (of technology) to execute their jobs effectively and efficiently are not because our education system is baseless, dysfunctional or decapitated. Our education system is neither dysfunctional nor decapitated. Our school systems are marginally financed, unable to provide optimum context for theoretical and practical learning experiences. The level of our industrial and technological development plays little or no role to support our schools and programs. Any such limitations can only be ascribed to our incomplete instructional practice.

In line with the above argument of mine, one writer suggested for cooperation with Western schools. As I tried to indicate before, as far as theoretical education is concerned our system is more or less similar to that of other nations. After all, our system adapts the system of Western schools with little or no effort to make it contextually appropriate and culturally approximate. Thus, university-to-university cooperation will simply have limited contribution. We don’t expect much from such schools we adapt our system in the first place.

The other possibility suggested was university-to-company cooperation. In developed nations, employers give apprenticeships, internships, and practicum to potential employees. It is rare practice for a company to provide apprenticeship or internship opportunities unless it enables it to pursue some sort of short- or long-term benefit. Thus, it would be naïve to expect, for instance, AT&T or BellSouth to provide practical training to Telecommunication engineering students of Addis Ababa University (AAU) or Bahir Dar University (BDU), as they would not be potential employees of the companies. Neither will Pfizer provide apprenticeship to graduates of the School of Pharmacy at AAU. Unless we have more domestic companies that demand more trained task force and enter into such kind of tradition, seeking for overseas technical training will not be a productive approach.

In conclusion, the source of the problems of our education system over the years is mainly our economic underdevelopment. Simply, we didn’t have the capacity to finance our education systems. This obliges us to provide incomplete instruction to our children and youth. Thus, the point of discourse in issues pertinent to our education system has to focus on real problems and possible solutions.

Desta Berhe

January 12, 2007