Employability:A ‘Subliminal Role’ of our Education System?
By Ronald B. Ndesanjo
It all started with my late-night tweet “It is sad that our education system has been degraded to a subliminal role: employability”. A couple of responses poured in hours later, one of them particularly interesting to me. One gentleman commented that “Without trying, in the least bit, to sound ironic but: that’s really not what ‘subliminal’ means”.
My first reaction was this gentleman could be right and I could be wrong. I am saying this because before tweeting I quickly looked for some words on an online dictionary and subliminal sounded like the right one. Some of you do that as well, don’t you? Another reason could be my poor command of English vocabulary in particular and the language in general.
I took up the challenge and looked the word up in my dictionary, this time a real one, not those on the internet. I started with ‘sublime’, assuming that this must be a root word. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (7th Edition) provides two meanings of the word: (1) “of a very high quality and causing great admiration”. This is not what I intended to say in the tweet! I read on, meaning (2) “(formal, often disapproving) (of a person’s behaviour or attitudes) extreme, especially in a way that shows they are not aware of what they are doing or are not concerned about what happens because of it”. I was relieved, at least this relates to what I meant to say in the tweet.
My worry was maybe I went overboard and used a human trait to describe a non-human aspect, ‘education’. So, subliminal, an adjective, is “affecting your mind even though you are not aware of it”. For most of us, education is directly proportional to employment (employability). I attempt to explain what I meant to say in that tweet here.
Over the years I have noted with concern that the quality of education in Tanzania is deteriorating. This is based on how ‘some’ people (including myself) perceive what high-quality education is. During my primary school days between the late 1980s and early to mid-1990s, the educational journey ending at standard seven was deemed fine, at least in the community I grew up. Yes, parents and pupils would like one to proceed with secondary school, but it wasn’t the end of the world if they didn’t.
In my opinion, standard seven leavers then could just do fine after school. You could tell that a person had learnt ’substantially’ just by looking at the transformations they brought with them from school. If it were farming, theirs was exemplary. If it were collective ‘development’ activities, these standard seven leavers were a beacon.
So, I always tend to think that we had a superior education curriculum then, one that ‘nurtured’ pupils’ natural abilities to master their environment. Then came the mid to late 1990s (the turning point) when things began going awry in our education system. Standard seven education was nothing now. Parents strived for their children to go at least up to form four (Ordinary Level Secondary Education/O-Level). At that time going to high school (Advanced Level Secondary Education/A-Level) was still a big deal. Form Six leavers were rare gems in our neighbourhoods. I am not sure whether it was due to my limitation(s) in terms of how I looked at the world then (and reflecting now) or that a Form Six leaver of 1995 was far better than that of 2019.
To cut a long story short, now you are nothing, unless you have a Ph.D.! Yes, a Ph.D. A good number of people are obsessed with this thing and I have no slightest clue why. Worse enough, many don’t even have a career in academia and/or research that would necessitate a Ph.D.
Come to think of it, I only see one possible explanation: ‘employability’ or at least remaining relevant in the ‘labour market’. It is common to encounter a person who did their Bachelor’s degree in education, taught for a while before embarking onto a Master’s degree in ‘Monitoring and Evaluation (M & E)‘ before realizing a Ph.D. in ‘Climate Change‘ is what matters now and decide to enroll for one.
We have reached a point, as a country, where the ultimate purpose of education is for one to get employment or employ themselves. I think this (being employed) should rather be the primary goal, maybe second to basic literacy. ‘Educating’ people for ‘employment’ is not an evil thing, not at all.
Of course, we need people to be ‘educated’ for ‘our development’ and nation-building. My problem is when education is just that, and nothing more. So, when you encounter people wishing to ‘burn’ their certificates because they don’t have a job you know what I am trying to say. The worst thing is we don’t seem to realize that this is happening. We seem to accept it as the norm. This was my reflection when I tweeted.
Then there was another response to the tweet, “what do you think should be done as a solution?” I don’t think I know or can propose one. Maybe some raw thoughts on how to improve our education system. I will use accountancy, accountants, and technological innovations (advances) as hypothetical examples in my illustration.
Think of accountancy as a practice of keeping or checking financial accounts. For a long time, this has been regarded as one of the most lucrative professions, praise to its proximity to where the money is. We should not be surprised to learn one day (and very soon) that accountancy is an obsolete profession as we have traditionally known it. Human accountants (we may have machine accountants) will cease to exist one day.
If I am to start a start-up, an accountant will be the least of my worries. Technology can do most of the financial accounting stuff nowadays. I guess there are plenty of applications on Google Play or App Store let alone custom-made accounting packages that any computer literate person can learn and execute. Guess who I might hire first: a graphic designer (or a creative artist), maybe an IT person if it happens I need a lot of that serious computing stuff, and a sales psychologist (as a consultant, to start with).
So, what will my accountant friend do? Enroll for a Ph.D. because his/her Certified Public Accountant (CPA) expertise can no longer match up with tech innovations in Information Communication Technologies (ICT) or Artificial Intelligence (AI)? The challenge (in this case to our educationists) is how do we come up with educational curricula that tap on and nurture human imagination and creativity (we are all born with these) to conquer the world and not just accountancy that can go extinct with a single brilliant innovation by a 25-year-old in Silicon Daror one of these tech hubs in the region.
I am one of those people who ‘think’ that humans are perfectly designed to conquer their environment. Education systems were just created to ‘organise’ this ability mainly for utility purposes. Are we comfortable with the fact that our education system remains a mere factory of producing salespersons to merchandise Coca Cola from Atlanta, Georgia or Heineken Beer from Amsterdam and get frustrated one day when AI takes over from our young women and men (unemployment of ‘the educated’)? Or do we choose to have an education system that will nurture our young people’s natural abilities so they are ever dynamic, adaptive and resilient?
Are you trying to say that colonial education system was better than ours? – because at least the primary school leavers performed better than today’s Form Four leavers?
Is it because our education system forces all Tanzanians to pass through a unified education system, … no specialization (especially at a very early stages of education)???
Can we change it?? Whom to bring those changes?? What’s about the political will??
*Charity begins at home, let’s do what we think is fine for the betterment of our kids rather that keeping on waiting for the government’s actions*