My father was not a highly educated person but held the passionate dream that I get a higher education his best means could afford. My university education in part may have addressed that deep aspiration of his. But looking back I have only understood how that education was poorly served. An education that readily afforded me just a modest means to put food on the table, get a family, fend for a few relatives and that’s it. It never truly brought original impetus or profound transformation to me or my own society. In the end educated people from Africa suffer from the blight of narrow definition of what their education was meant to serve, and worse still, from the impotent content of the education they got. Many Africans who share similar cultural and social background with me would readily find a handle to this perspective. What does Africa’s education system aspire to achieve? The first generation of Africa’s elites wanted education mainly to give vent to the budding nationalistic energy in them, and to furnish it with some form of enlightened presentation, so they could readily discharge the weapons of their “learning” in the field of struggle for independence-to fight the Whiteman in his own language with the same tool he fashioned. They achieved that in good time and made their way up the stage-with all the profusions of a good life, savouring the benefits of their “success”. Young generations of Africans readily gleaned from the “success stories” of their forbears. Education to an African is seen as step to the “good life” and a fireproof means to widen the sphere of personal privileges. And that almost is what the societies they inhabit seem to be about. Africa’s learning architecture must transform into a tool for societal transformation. Certificates must not rank above creativity. Learning must first and foremost become a productive end-that is to generate sustainable manpower requirements for advancement and fulfillment of national development aspirations. Africa’s learning model stem from formal repetitions than from dynamic newness. Pupils are deemed to have passed examinations only if they conform to the tasking regimen of committing to memory answers to questions intended by their examiner. Nigeria alone has profuse stream of “first class” degree holders in Science and Technology, and struggles with the ironic scandal of having the worst Technology deficiencies- never been able to come up with any known Technology patent for almost 50 years after its national independence. Scandalous revenue is voted each year by African governments for services procured from foreign professionals. Yet new Technology institutions spring up by the day, mainly as propositions on basis of political patronage. Most countries of Africa pass mainly as destinations for third-grade Technology know-how: like Automobile assembly industries, Commodity packaging firms, or rollout plants for completely knocked down (CKD) parts. A strange position for a continent in dire need of Technology revolution. The Asian economies of Singapore, China and Malaysia become compelling models of successful Technology revolutions supported on the lattice of innovative resilience of its people. Government initiatives of propping top quality science and Technology innovations by massive investments in Research and Developments have paid off by the immense advancements’ of the economies of these nations. Their bright minds are trained and retained in research intensive institutions funded by the government and specialist institutions in collaborations with other experts around the world. Conversely Africa’s best minds are “held hostage” in foreign lands where they “empty their brains” for pittance. Back home they stand as iconic symbols of success- revered and held in high esteem. This kind of misplaced adulation has made leaving the continent to foreign lands a crucial personal objective. This flight of intellectual capital is huge deficit to Africa’s development prospects. A better learning architecture for Africa should produce sufficient “design holders” and not “degree holders”. People who think different from their teachers. Questioning minds whose minds could shatter myths and stare the horizon from the point of creative agitations than of punitive fear. Africa must harvest from its education fields “rocket launchers” able to launch their nations from the lurch of ordinary models of pedestrian economies to orbits of global competiveness. The offices in Africa are riddled with once-bright minds now chewing curds like goats -regurgitating year after year memorized routines without additional inputs of vital creative insights. The need to turn out people with Business minds and thinking would reduce the surge for salaried jobs-with even more and more people optimizing the free enterprise space in the economy for wealth creation. Net givers, not net takers drive the economy. The curricula of the African education system should have in basic business education able to spurt people with bright ideas not bright scores into the galaxies of creative rendezvous-offer profound latitude for creative audacity- providing potent launch pad for what “you can do” rather than “what you should do” and “what you should never do”. Students should not go home with swollen heads from punitive strokes of the cane, like I once had for failing to recite some idle rhymes of out-moded note takings. Such frightful intimidations only produced a handful of “book rodents” who lived on books, but destroyed its value in the end. Me and the thousands of scholars in my generation lived to please our parents, aspired to win prizes set by teachers, but could hardly afford the substantial promise and prospects our education most rightly engendered. As a rudimentary start to this new revolution of the learning process, Africa must begin with first and foremost, with the most basic education of all-the education of identity. Africa must true to its aspirations teach its people to believe in who they are and the formidable prospects locked in that faith of identity. We have to relearn to assert the originality of the value of what makes us who we are, and not the stereotypes coming from other climes. This takes considerable patience and skills like it held for china- taking up more than seven decades of tremendous cultural and mental transformation- reclaiming their internal originality and precipitating a new vista of an indigenous flavor of new civilization – placing them as the second largest economy next to America. An heir apparent to the last super power. China speaks Chinese- dress Chinese, eat Chinese. Chinese people have come to place abundant faith in who they are and what they stand for- resisting centuries of formidable pressures from the western world for them to give away their new-found national audacity. The sublimation of China’s supreme Technology achievements and economic success came about by the process of decades of remodeling their learning architecture-one that was realistic, ambitious innovative and original-devoid of meaningless routines.
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