eMKambo Vibes – 12 February 2018
Revisiting and reconciling differences between literacy and knowledge transfer It is now known that African graduates are not able to exploit abundant natural resources because the academic education system focuses too much on literacy at the expense of capacity to absorb and apply knowledge. In fact, education policy makers continue to confuse knowledge acquisition and transfer with literacy, which is basically the ability to read, write and recall some alphabets and numbers. After being immersed in such a system, most people are not able to convert knowledge into goods and services. Part of the problem is the disjointed nature of the academic system. For instance, when children move from grade one to two they completely forget what they learnt in grade one. Same when moving from Form one to Form two. All the way to Form 6 and tertiary level, there is no seamless connection between levels. When you move to the next level you forget previous content in order to create space for the new content.
The curse of time lag between absorption and application In the formal academic system, from grade one to university level, the time lag between knowledge absorption and application is too long such that a lot of useful knowledge is lost before being applied. We are not suggesting that children in primary school go for industrial attachment. Each community has knowledge acquisition and transfer systems that run parallel to the academic system. The academic route should be linked to these existing alternative knowledge flow systems through which communities generate solutions and cope with difficult circumstances like drought or outbreak of diseases. Almost every African community has multiple knowledge traditions such as individual knowledge, community knowledge, specialist knowledge, organizational knowledge and holistic knowledge. 1