The status of our education

By anonymous

January 7^th, 2007

I read the article by Gezaee Hailemichael with great interest. Here are my thoughts of the problem we face.

This is an issue that many have been discussing and arguing for long. Why is that we don’t produce educated individuals who tackle the problems of the society rather who interpret the successes and developments of the west? At the start, education was meant to organize knowledge that is needed to solve society’s problem, be it engineering or agricultural training or Medicine. In Ethiopia though, the way education was introduced was as a separate entity which was meant to be just lernt so that to reach where the western has reached. Gifted bright individuals, who would have been part of the society and creative enough to solve many of the problems that they see in their day to day life then go to school and at the end we have a product fit for office job but totally dysfunctional when it comes to the actual problem of the society. Here are some examples;

If we see Ethiopian business, it is mainly controlled by traditional business people with little structured education let alone economics, business or management degree. If you talk to those business people of hiring graduates from Ethiopian universities, they don’t see the benefit of that as those individuals are totally dissociated from the reality of Merkato. Ethiopian business graduates are highly knowledgeable about the western theories of business or the founders of each branch but none of them have ever went to merkato to study the dynamics of the business. None of them research the business of the country, work with those business people and create mutual interest. So if we want to get the respect of the business community, students have to be creative and work in things that matter most to the local merchants and business individuals. This includes showing the Merkato business individual how to cut his running cost and increasing his business. This, he will understand and he will see the benefit of hiring those type of educated individuals. He is not going to understand nor respect the gold medalist from business management school whose paper was on marshal plan and its impact on Western Europe.

Let us look in to agriculture. Though over 80% of the population works on agriculture, the majority are traditional local individuals who learn farming and its related business from family and friends. Most of those individuals never went to school to promote their knowledge in their respective field. That is why I think we still farm with antiquated farming techniques. Those who goes to agricultural colleges, who were supposed to solve those very problems ends up in being office bureaucrats who wants to work in NGO’s or government offices forecasting the farming season or doing just paper work. None of them is motivated to go back to farming and revolutionize the farming industry. When we advocate to send a farmer’s son to school what we are making is we are robbing him the ability to farm, and the knowledge of the land that comes with it. He will be used to sitting many hrs in school, then in college and Universities if he is fortunate to go to university. After graduation, he will never return to the farming business back. So in essence if he can’t get a job he will be one additional jobless individual and he even does not know how to farm as his father. I have yet to see an agriculture graduate who is dreaming to go back and start agriculture. Everyone I know wants to work in Addis, even after getting a degree from Alamaya University. Then the question is do we have to continue teaching this type of curricula which westernize the fertile minds of the country but totally separates them from reality and solving home grown problems.

That is why we are not creating creative individuals. The society is yet to see the benefit of sustaining those universities at high cost. For Ethiopians, the return of their investment on higher education is extremely bad. The society has not seen any meaningful change in agriculture though we continue opening another agricultural University. We have not seen meaningful change on communication though we keep graduating engineers of different caliber. We can say the state of health of the nation is going from bad to worse though we keep graduating high caliber medical doctors who have no problem in passing the rigorous requirements of the west. So what does the society want? History graduate who analyze the details of Second World War or historian of Zague dynasty? Literature graduates who is well versed with every work of Dante and Shakespeare or who can write say on Adwa war with Italy or era of red terror? Medical graduates who are over qualified for the medical facilities and equipments we have or health officers who are expert on malaria, diarrheal diseases and vaccination? Which one benefits the majority?

So then what is the responsibility of the government? Solving the pressing society problem and to do so training individuals who are meant to solve those problems or open universities which are admired to be as fulfilling “western standards”. We have to understand that as an individual, those educated ones, who pass through our universities, have personally benefited. It includes all of us who could assimilate to such life style here with such an ease. But this is at a great cost to the society where we came in as a whole. The generation in whom the government starts to implement such policy will personally loose a lot. They will miss the “standardized training and degree programs”. But should the society be hostage to one generation and abandon its dream of solving pressing problems?

When I say this, I don’t mean that we have to totally separate ourselves from the technical developments that are shaping the world we live in. We have to try to open universities addressing those issues. But this high tech venture which does not have an immediate impact on the majority of the society should not be the principal priority of the government or at best should be left for the private sector.

At last, I want to say few words about the English language that was cursed by Mr. Gezaee Hailemichael. The fact that our language of higher education is English is in my view a positive part of our schools. Rather than inventing the wheel all over again, this will help us adopting many that were seen to be successful in different society. It helps us to tap knowledge from a big community of English speaking societies rather than being forced to be restricted to our local language. My deep rooted feeling is that the problem is not the language but the curricula and set of priority that we choose to propel forward. If we don’t change our objective, even if we change the media of communication to our local language, the problem will remain the same.

So the final question is for us, for those who are educated and are promises of the country for a new direction. Are we ready to change our higher education at any personal cost? To answer this is to answer the big issue.