EDUCATION; HOW OUR QUEST FOR GOLD COST US DIAMONDS.
What do we mean by education?
The popular maxim goes, “There is nothing new under the sun.” While many might find this statement untrue and disagree with it especially in an age of astronomy and space exploration, our topic of interest is a typification of the maxim. Education itself is as old as intelligence or the ability to learn. This, of course is due to a biological make up consisting of a brain. Regardless of how you think brains and organisms which possess them came to exist, learning and hence education are as old as the ability to remember and think.
A general way of defining education is, “A continuous process of learning that spans the time period between birth and death.” This of course encompasses a vast range of learning experiences. Those who came before us classified education into formal and informal education. Informal education is what we mainly talk about when we say that education is as old as intelligent life and is basically any of the myriad of learning experiences attained outside the school setting. Its formal counterpart is the form of education received in a school setting and is an offshoot of any human civilization. Formal education is the scope of this literary piece and is what is implied hereinafter whenever the word “education” is used.
How did it come to be?
Yet another popular maxim, this time more unanimously acknowledged goes, “Knowledge is power.” The rise of human civilizations anywhere on the surface of the earth always necessitated that the people get to know and think beyond instinct and meeting physiological needs. There came need for shelter, recreation, medical care, peace, territory, trade and identity among other pertinent things. Such could only be attained through a knowledge and understanding of humanity, human thinking, human interactions with one another and with the environment as well as the interaction between the various elements of the environment. The next question was where to get this knowledge, how to build up on it and how to spread it to the community.
Having started in ancient prehistoric Egypt, literature was always an essential part of civilization owing to the numerous benefits accrued to it. Literature became a cornerstone in keeping records and transfer of knowledge from one individual and/or community to another. Formal education was thus highly intertwined with writing and reading such that the combination of both skills otherwise known as literacy became a hallmark of education for millennia.
What caused education to be birthed.
Back to why education even arose in the first place. Human civilization always thrived on the existence of skilled individuals who could undertake a craft on behalf of the community. The existence of these people was always reinforced by rewards in form of trading a skill, especially in aristocracies. Trade, akin to education has always been an integral pillar from which human civilization derives its support Trade of skills reinforced the existence of skills and those who bore them. A means of bearing these skills thus became necessary and a big form of education was incorporated, known as apprenticeship. Apprenticeship gave continuity to existing skills and crafts pertinent to the sustenance of civilization.
At this point, it can be seen that education began to fulfill the need to transfer skills of craft and secondarily to give basic knowledge required to utilize, sustain, refine and transfer those skills
Arithmetic, reading and writing better known as “the 3R’s” were the compliments that were taught to augment the practical skills and have been the basis of education until date.
Education got spiced up along the way.
The emergence of Greek, Persian and Roman civilizations in that order produced a significant transformation of education and how it was delivered. Skills and the 3R’s took on much form in these. These civilizations also necessitated a philosophy behind the crafts that were used to solve human problems. Physics, human medicine, mathematics, politics, biology, geography, psychology, theology and justice are some of the philosophies that emerged consequent to this necessity. Disciplines secondary to these emerged later on over time. The next big task ahead was now to ensure that these fields of knowledge were imparted to the other members of the communities such that innovation could go on. Aristocracy and autocracy characterized most of the ancient civilizations and the insatiable thirst for greatness among those who were on top in these systems incentivized the investment of the flag bearers of civilizations into developing formal education. The latter started taking a form closer to the education we know today
Trade is another offshoot of human civilization with which it has been heavily intertwined. As has been alluded to earlier, trade enables mankind solve his needs by using what was in his possession or reach to acquire what he lacked or could not acquire within his own means; whether it be goods, amenities, services, skills or even pleasure. It then goes without mention that anyone who desired to get anything through trade must have something to offer in the first place. In aristocracies (which were majority of the human societies at the time), most people had only their labor to offer. Educational skills training enabled these people optimize their labor to be as efficient as could possibly be, while intellectual training offered these people the knowledge and understanding needed to trade their goods, services and skills most efficiently. Disciplines such as economics owe their existence to this kind of necessity. Education remained largely like this a balanced blend of practical skill and intellectual training meant to create a class of individuals who could propel society and mankind forward for a long period of time into the dark ages up until the Renaissance period.
Did we lose it along the way?
If for some reason or other, reading the preceding paragraphs have made you question the congruence of the title to the content herein, it is because the history of education had to come first, to show that those who birthed the idea of education meant pure good. Education had not always been the money pit that many look at it today as; neither had it always been some propaganda machine for creating government loyalists and indoctrinating children with global agendas. No, those who thought it necessary to bring forward the idea of education did not intend that it create a class of some elites breathing flames of complicated terminology albeit with no tangible significance to society. Maybe you might blame some of those who brought forward this idea for indeed wanting to deepen existing social class differences, something still very much visible today as seen with terms like “Ivy League”. So if education was as well intentioned as this “boy” claims, where did we go wrong? How did we end up having a direct proportionality between high levels of education within generations and deficiency in problem solving skills and crafts? Where to did intellectual superiority among the highly educated disappear when education was meant to provide intellectual training to its recipients? When did it get normalized that students finish studies with $40,000 hanging over their heads as student loan debts? Many are the questions but the answers are few. I can help with answering a good many of the
questions, but I do maintain that these are merely my opinions basing on what I have seen and analyzed. I may be wrong while I opine and in fact I too may partly typify some of the aforementioned inadequacies of present day education.
In the Renaissance and the industrial revolution that followed, life became defined by monarchies, aristocracies, trade, capitalism, philosophy, science and everything in between. One of the many things that seemed to have been emanated from all these was the rise of professions. Professions were a refined form of the pre-existing skilled products of education. Professions, however, involved a greater deal of intellectual capability and hence training than traditional trades. The balance was in consequence tipped in favor of intellectual training. The intention, however was never to completely rid the education system of the skills training it had always afforded to its beneficiaries. On the contrary, the saturation of education with intellectual training was intended to produce a competent work force and refine how they utilized the skills needed to solve the world’s problems and advance the world forward. This is partly where the problem has its roots.
Where we went wrong on education.
The ever increasing competence requirements for the educated in society meant that those who studied under the formal system had to learn more and hence spend more time in the learning environment, known as school. More often than not, this alienated the young people from the societies whose problems they were meant to solve. This also sometimes had the effect that self-discovery was limited and students were not having the ability to follow after their passions and talents, an initially small and minor kink to the process that would later grow big enough to haunt entire generations as shall be seen in later sections.
Combined, the rise of professions and the ever increasing standard on which competence was assessed arbitrarily by society necessitated that there exist a form of mark of educational achievement, to differentiate those who had actually attained the education intended from those who only got part or did not get at all. There thus arose another one of the pillars of modern day education, one of the most significant from which several challenges have arisen and will continue to arise, one from which a good many of problems associated with modern education have roots; academic qualifications. Academic qualifications are not in themselves wrong; most of us would argue that academic qualifications are more good than bad. The actual problem regarding academic qualifications is not they themselves, but the inadvertent centering of an entire education on academic qualifications. Every system has its check points and quality assurances to ensure that the system is profitable; churning out more than it sucks in. Academic qualifications are the quality check in our education. My argument here is that academic qualifications did not fail us; we failed to properly use academic qualifications. Here is how and why.
How we went wrong.
Academic qualifications in themselves require quality checks to ascertain that a recipient of an education has indeed attained the necessary training to warrant the receipt of the qualification, similar to quality control processes in industrial manufacturing. When it comes to education, the quality control process is in the form of assessments. Assessments are meant to ascertain the extent to which a student has understood what they have been taught or trained on. Assessment additionally serves to make known whether a student is even worthy of receiving the qualification anyway. A common form of assessment is examinations; mainly in form of written tests and sometimes oral tests. Many argue
that as far as education is concerned, examinations are the original sin, and they are right for the most part.
It is worth noting that examinations predate the advent of professions, but the intertwining of examinations with academic qualifications drifted education off its intended course. Also important to appreciate is the fact that those who intertwined education with these two aspects had no ill intention. To them, exams and academic qualifications were never meant to be an end but rather means to the end, the end being a competent task force that would solve the day to day challenges of society and take part in advancing civilization. Our big failure as humanity was letting nature take its course when we could have put in place checks to ensure that the means never become the end. When such checks eventually did come in place, they were inefficient and late. Until date, we still try to give ground to the checks so they may take root. We also still bear the consequences of letting education being centered on academic qualifications and its nephew called exams. Even then, this duo cannot be solely held responsible for the deviation of education from the direction its sires intended.
And then capitalism joined the party.
A common but controversial adage with which we all are familiar goes, “Money is the root of all evil,” definitely a corruption of the biblical statement, “The love for money is the root of all evil,” a statement by St. Paul in one of his epistles very much quoted within the Christian faith. Many disagree with the maxim but will also agree that it holds much water when we talk about the contribution of money to the deviation of education from its original course. Just like education, money is yet another revolutionary element of human civilization which has been very much misused and drifted off the intended course. The continuous progression of civilization and trade gave rise to capitalism. Capitalism and everything about it are highly complex and cannot be explained here. Capitalism reinforced the need for academic qualifications backed by excellent performance in exams so that individuals could get employed by governments and private enterprises seeking the technical competence of educated individuals in order to increase the profits they could accrue from trade. This seemingly utopian system was indeed golden, as it resulted in the rise of a middle class, people who could rise from nothing and gain relevance in the society because they had a source of a highly reliable income, working jobs that were highly linked to the qualifications they had acquired from their studies. Indeed, education bore a promise of a utopia for its recipients and this promise remained alive for a really long time, even till date. The issue though was that this promise was not going to last eternity if everything remained “as is” and the fact that we as a human race almost unanimously assumed that it was an eternal promise is what many refer to as our own undoing.
The effects of capitalism on education, however, did not stop at creating a diversionary course for it. Capitalism also meant, albeit inadvertently, that governments could not fully sustain the cost of providing free education to all under it and resulted in the liberalization of education. The liberalization of education in many ways is important for the maintenance of a quality education system and just like many other “bad things” referred to in this discussion, the negative consequences it gave unto the education system were more of by products and our inefficiency or inability to enforce quality checks. My focus here will be on Uganda from where I hail and whose system I understand best.
In Uganda, the liberalization of the education sector towards the turn of the millennium was a big win for everyone in general. The government did not have to stretch its pockets in educating an ever increasing population. Parents with deep pockets could give their children an education spiced with
luxury with optimum resources by merely paying for it. Individuals could earn a living from providing an education for those who could afford. It is from this last group, the entrepreneurs that a good many of the issues emanated, this time not inadvertently. They, however, did not do the harm alone. Everyone contributed. Here is why.
Remember that the initial diversion of education off its course was by its centering around academic qualifications and examinations? Yeah, this has not yet ended and I did make mention of the fact that this still continues till date. When education got liberalized, there came a commercial race for who could secure the best deal when it comes to providing education. The centering of education around exams affected all levels of education but the effect was more pronounced in the lower levels of primary and secondary school while the centering around academic qualifications had more pronounced effect on the tertiary institutions especially universities.
In primary and secondary school, those who owned schools understood that the parents of the day solely measured educational success basing on the examination results that their children brought back home. The next ambition was therefore to guarantee parents that their children would surely excel in a certain school. In such cases, the ends justify the means, and so did it happen. Free market economics resulted in the devising of off the book means to secure grades. Cheating in national examinations became mainstay in some institutions and became a real threat to safeguard from. Where schools saw cheating as far too immoral a means, sometimes the students took it upon themselves and stealthily carried out. Even then, all schools left the traditional “training a useful member of society” kind of education and went to a new kind of training that focused on securing the best possible grades. Extracurricular engagements were thrown out of the window and the entirety of students’ lives was spent feeding them academic content to enable them secure the next big grade. School holidays kept growing shorter and even the practical aspects of training seemed to have been terribly reduced or in some cases altogether lost whernever they were not examinable. Students became like bulls being fattened to maximize meat production. It however, did not stop here. Teaching that was previously focused on making students understand concepts pertinent to their practice in solving the world’s problems just focused on making them understand scoring points for exams. Text books were replaced with pamphlets often devoid of in-depth explanations and marking guides for exams. The net overall effect was a collection of students leaving a given level of study with excellent grades, no accurate memory of what they leant and no skill or exposure outside the academic environment. I guess at this point; you can tell what I am driving at.
In the tertiary levels of education, the situation was a bit more complicated than in the lower sections. The entrepreneurs involved here understood the prestige surrounding university degrees of every level. They also understood that some university degrees offered way more prestige than others. Case in point being law, medicine and engineering. University education had always been reserved for the intellectually competent, who had proved themselves in lower sections. Of course with the centering of an entire education on exams came an unprecedented rise in the number of these people. However, even then, there were still those who fell short but desired the prestige and advantages of attaining a university education. Here came a gap from where someone else could earn their daily bread. Institutions came up to cater for those who were disrespectfully considered outcasts of university education. We of course now know that these are not indeed failures, but victims of a sabotaged education system. All the same anyway, these were opportunities for someone to earn their daily bread. Institutions availed themselves to give the students what the other universities had refused to. Because
many of these had been let down by lower levels of education, university education would not have as much the desired effect on them. The next big problem arose; an incompetent task force. The incompetence, however, was not limited to the products of the private smaller scale universities; even those from the larger public universities started showing some level of incompetence because they all had been products of the same lower education system which impaired their ability to learn and instead focused them on bagging the next grade.
Have we neared rock bottom?
It can easily be seen how we went off the course, how we lost focus and where from we switched from education to produce an elite and technical skill force that was going to solve our problems to education that is only there to feed egos and save individuals from becoming social misfits. Where we went wrong here is where we go wrong almost every time; finding black and white solutions for gray problems, an incessant loop in which problems necessitate solutions and the wrong solutions create new problems which then make it look like the initial problem was never supposed to be solved at all in the first place
On analysis of most of the world’s problems, this trend can be seen recurring, almost like a loop in which humanity is trapped.
Here is also another problem. When we look at issues like these, we tend to try to shift the blame to someone else, another loop which never gets anything fixed. Take this instance, parents blame schools for focusing too much on academic training and ignoring other aspects of life exposure and nurturing, but will not hesitate to transfer their children to schools which perform better because they are taking shortcuts. Governments will blame schools for centering a lot of the training on examinations instead of holistic upbringing but will award scholarships based solely on academic grades. Everyone will blame education service providers for expensive education but will still blame them for poor quality education; which is not really poor quality but just devoid of exam passing machinery. If we got to get anywhere, the onus is upon us to understand that we cannot eat our cake and still have it.
While we are at it, it is worth wondering though, is there really a solution to all this? Do we even need a solution to all this? Is there even a problem in the first place? Psychologists have often talked about an age-old sentiment where humans often feel like we constantly are in a state of decline in which the present looks like a downgrade of some glorious golden and utopian past. The sentiment often increases when reminiscing about a time when one was never even present to begin with. It could be that I am raising false alarms and the education system has always been perfect and might in fact be getting better. Whether or not you share my alarmist sentiments is purely up to you, but it sure would be worth noting that the issues discussed herein are real and plague our education system, not borne out of simple delusion. As to what the future holds, well time will tell.