Is Our Education Appropriate?

I was so impressed by this article by Dr. Ian Clarke that was published in The Sunday Vision. It is kind of debate I would like raise with my friends, colleagues and citizens of Uganda. Most importantly, my sons. Read on and feel free to comment...

WE are in that season when young people are frantically trying to enrol for courses at universities and it appears that a candidate chooses a university course more on the basis of availability than preference. Universities generally find it easier to set up classroom-based courses — what is known as ‘chalk and talk’, than the more difficult to run science or engineering courses, which require laboratories and practical training facilities.

Hence such arts courses are more readily available and large numbers of students choose subjects such as social sciences. Each time I interview for an administrative position, practically all the candidates seem to have social science degrees and while many of these young people are bright, there are not enough jobs to go around.

Law is another popular degree; perhaps because there is a perception that lawyers are among the cream of society. But how many lawyers does Uganda need? I understand that the Uganda Law Development Centre spits out 600 lawyers onto our streets every year. What can a developing country do with 600 young lawyers, all looking for work?

Lawyers in Uganda are like actors in Hollywood — there are many aspiring, but few who make it to the top, while the rest are left to hustle for a living. Now if all of these bright young lawyers were trained as doctors, it would be a different story. Uganda trains less than 200 doctors per year, all of whom have a clientele of 28 million people just waiting for their services.

I asked a friend from India what were the factors which had been responsible for India’s rapid development. He attributed a large part of India’s development to IT and further pointed out that a high percentage of people working in the US, in companies such as Google and Microsoft, are Indian. He felt that Indians have an advantage over their American counterparts, because of the type of maths-based education they receive in India where they were taught to use numbers, without first referring to a calculator.

Hence their minds were trained in mathematical skills from an early age, which in turn translates into excellent computing skills. So how are we training the minds of our young people in Uganda? Our education system is based on rote learning, in which the student has to cram facts into his memory. We are not training their minds in problem solving, nor are we teaching them to have enquiring minds.

Sometimes it is quite the reverse, we are simply stuffing them full of facts and since the facts are theoretical and not related to the experience of the student, they are immediately forgotten. If we were to train those students to have inquiring minds, then we would be developing brilliant minds to be employed in solving the real-life problems of business and entrepreneurship.

So is our education really appropriate to our needs as a developing country and are we training in such a way that our young people become valuable human capital? There are two ways in which education can be useful. The first is to train someone in a profession which is useful in the society, such as being a doctor, agriculturalist, or teacher.

However, when there is a glut of certain professions (such as lawyers) we can place less emphasis on training in these disciplines. The second use of education is to train people to use their mind as a tool — to train them how to think, analyse and problem-solve.

The Indians were given an education that helped them use their minds in computing, but there are many other skills that the mind can be trained in. What we should be asking ourselves is what we are training our young people for and how we are training them. I heard about a child who was rebuked for questioning the teacher and told to keep quiet, while the teacher droned on.

The principle of computing — rubbish in, rubbish out — also applies to education. If our children are made sit through school, never question anything and dutifully copy down facts from the board, then don’t expect them to show initiative, think for themselves, or show aptitude to take responsibility when they reach the workplace.