Quality over quantity - The Namibian Education System

Anyone remember Albert Einstein? Genius of a dude. Created the theory of relativity. Nope! Not annoying uncles and aunts, not those kinds of relatives. He is famous for the equation; E = MC²  . Anyone? Well, he once said “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.” Charlie Chaplin once joked that people knew him because they understood him, but only knew Einstein because they didn’t understand him. Who is Charlie Chaplin? Uhm, okay:  let’s just stick to Einstein because a history lesson will take too long. Einstein also said, “I fear the day technology overlaps with our humanity. The world will only have a generation of idiots.” Looking at the Namibian Grade 12 results for the 2013 exams, Professor Einstein might have been on to something. We have kids that appear to speak English but fail the language in school. That know every setting on an I-phone 5S but can’t find the area of a square. You will find young adults in a room laughing, but none is talking to the others: they are all on their mobile phones. The end is near.

But let me get to the point, why are kids failing formal education in Namibia? The country allocates more than 20% of its budget to Education every year. But the results show no progress, they’ve been stagnant so long that even the optimists have lost hope. Why are the kids failing? I’ve always said that the system is failing the kids, I’ve written about it before. Below is what I wrote then.

Should we scrape the system and start over, is it too late to fix it? Both questions can be answered, with a “No!” The system is already too far entrenched but it is not too late to fix it. It has weaknesses but it also has strengths and the one quality is that when it produces quality it produce’s top quality. You can scour the globe and I  bet you that will find them, the high grade products of Namibia’s education system from Moscow to Havana, Johannesburg, New Delhi  and all the way to Kenya. An example is that to date none of the geologists that graduated from University of Namibia’s geology department have failed honours or higher level further studies. If Namibian student’s at institutions all over the world are doing so well, why are there so few of these type of quality products and why are the majority still failing?

So in simple terms, the system produces very good thinkers adapt at solving problems and dealing with changing problems. The problem in my view (everyone else with have different views, but it’s my blog!) is that the foundation is very weak. Grade 1 to 7 is the key to succeeding in our system and a great percentage of learners are left behind in this phase, in the rural schools it’s a catastrophe. The excuses are many, but I propose a simple solution which is to strengthen the system from the bottom up, starting now. Those already halfway through are sadly in for a struggle. Start the quality of learning at pre-school, teach them early and teach them young. Which means train the teachers from grade 1 – 7 better and build better infrastructure for the primary phase. A kid that can spell and count will pass an exam on a broken desk, but put a kid that can’t spell at a new desk and the kid will fail (think of it as buying Nike vapour boots for kids who can’t play soccer and then complaining when they get beaten by kid’s playing barefoot). There is nothing that high school teachers can do because they are receiving low quality from primary schools. It’s not the roof of the house that needs re-enforcing but it’s the foundation, anyone with common sense knows that you build from the bottom up.

The politician’s don’t care because they send their kids to private schools and South African universities, not to mention free scholarship’s to China. So the onus is on us to increase the quantity of the quality products that come through the system, it can be done but it will take time, effort, planning and brains that are younger than 50 years old. There are several solutions that I could include but I believe this one will start us off on our way to realising all that Vision 2030 day dreaming we are so proud off.