President Jakya Kikwete launches the Education and Training Policy 2014 in Dar es Salaam last month. With him are the Education and Vocational Training Minister, Shukuru Kawambwa (second left), and Dar es Salaam Regional Commissioner Said Meck Sadik.
After a public outcry for many years on a gradual decline in the quality of education, at last the government has responded with affectation and has launched the new education and training policy, 2014.
This policy replaces altogether about four old policies on education, covering almost all levels of education in the country.
This could have been the government’s effort to salvage the education system from collapse. But is there anything new in this policy, which the old policies on education failed to achieve and why?
Generally speaking, there is nothing new in this policy. Like the other policies, the new policy won’t make any better improvement in our public education system because there is neither will nor determination to do so. We all know that public education is now left for the poor, who cannot afford sending their children to better schools privately owned by either individuals or religious institutions. Our leaders are only paying lip service to public education as their political agenda to keep them in power, but in reality it’s not their major concern.
We know that for many years now children from poor families have been sitting on the floor in classrooms despite the trees we have that can be used to make good and affordable desks. The ratio of one teacher to 45 pupils has for many years remained unrealised dream. Does having at least 100 pupils in a 45-pupil capacity classroom need a new policy? We could first solve all these problems before embarking on formulating the new policy.
While technocracy might not be a big problem in running our educational institutions of all levels, the political system is a hurdle in the development of our education because it is responsible for giving us the country’s leadership. If we will continue having the kind of political leadership as we have now, I do not think we will be able to change our education for better through formulating new policies here and then. We should ask ourselves how many good policies and laws do we have and what have we done with them before having the new ones?
What could be said as a new thing in the policy, is that, it has merged together all old policies pertaining to education in one volume and the first one to be published in Kiswahili as the original language. The rest is just lip service to devising policies and then shelve them until a time of revising or writing a new policy comes. The new policy has focused mainly on rephrasing policy statements, a culture which has become our habit in formulating national policies. Half of this policy contains policy statements. Policy statements are now the style of formulating our policies.
Another thing, which the policy has featured is a legal structure of the education system. We had the Education Act, 1978, which I think the new policy will speed up its amendment or even require a new law on education. To my knowledge, the law has never been an issue in our leadership and management of the country. We are very smart in formulating policies and enacting legislation. The issue has always been the implementation of the policies and the laws we make. If we could have committed public leaders and proper management in the education sector, we wouldn’t have repeated similar mistakes now and then in primary and secondary schools. The policy has once again failed to resolve the long standing controversy of which should be our language for instruction - Kiswahili or English! Using two different languages for teaching in the same country is an awkward thing.
While we have not yet solved the crucial and persistent problem of lack of desks and latrines in both primary and secondary schools, now our leaders have started politicking again by promising poor people that they are going to be furnished with well-equipped laboratories and in the short-run their children will be furnished with laptops. This is a white lie and joke for poor and ignorant people, who have no alternative when it comes to the education of their children.
We must first ask ourselves, what have we achieved through the old policies? If we did not achieve much, was it because the policies were bad or we had no political will and determination to implement them? Every time we launch anything new, our leaders and in particular, the President, will say that the newest is the best. Newness of a policy cannot by itself change the situation. I believe, we have been formulating good policies accompanied by good strategies and programmes, but the problem has always been lack of political will and determination. As a nation, we often fail to realise what we want to achieve because we lack political will and determination.
For instance, the old education policy for primary and secondary schools of 1995 was good enough to guarantee our children to get best education if our leaders had political will to implement it as per letter. A government that cannot afford feeding schoolchildren even with porridge, how can it provide them with laptops? A government that cannot rehabilitate old school buildings, how can it provide schoolchildren with the best education as it pledges in the new policy?
By Mwassa Jingi
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