Education of yore: quality vs quantity

The Minister for Education, Science, Technology & Vocational Training, Prof Joyce Ndalichako, has told it like it is, painting ‘warts and all’ the quality of Education in Tanzania in this day and age. In an interview with the veteran broadcaster Tido Mhando of Azam-Tv, the Minister freely admitted that the quality of Education has virtually ‘gone to the dogs.’
This is an idiomatic expression in Her Britannic Majesty’s language –meaning here that Tanzanian Education ‘has gone badly wrong, and lost all the good things it had!’
[For the full story, please see ‘Ndalichako afichua siri kuzorota
Elimu’ on the front page of ‘TanzaniaDaima,’ July 25, 2016…]
We don’t have to go far for a recent example of this. Last May, the government in Dar es Salaam (or is it in ‘Idodomya,’ the Place of the Sinking Sands, pray?) sent packing for home 7,805 students of the University of Dodoma (UDom) for poor academic performance.
After probing the issue, the ‘Ndalichako Ministry’ established that only 382 of the students had the requisite qualifications to proceed with the UDom Science Teachers Training Programme!
Tanzania has a shortage of some 80,000 school teachers, mostly for Secondary School Math and Science subjects. As a solution, the President Jakaya Kikwete Administration (2005-2015) devised a training programme which inducted 7,805 students into UDom.
In the event, a clearly noble intention and unprecedented initiative turned into a fiasco of scandalous proportions! Never mind that a ‘nondescript Ward Secondary School in Arusha toppled giants’ in the 2016 Form-VI exam results! But, this doesn’t mean that the Education quality has improved!
We’re also told in the same breath that ‘overall performance dropped… 97.32 per cent of those who attempted the exams this year passed – a slight decrease from 97.65 per cent in 2015!’ [See ‘Ward School rules the roost!’ The Citizen: July 16, 2016].
Oh, I don’t know – especially what with the UDom fiasco and a proliferation of fake academic qualifications to access public service and entrance into academic institutions. If I say so myself, this sort of thing never happened before political Independence from alien rule on December 9, 1961 – and a couple of decades thereafter!
In those good old days, focus and emphasis were on QUALITY, functional Education, NOT on quantity; not on numbers of educational institutions countrywide, and enrollment and ‘graduation’ numbers!
I did my Higher School Certificate (HSC; today’s ‘Advanced Level’ or ‘Form-VI’) Exams in 1962 under the University of Cambridge Local
Examinations Syndicate (UCLES). UCLES was established in 1858 as a not-for-profit, non-teaching Department of Cambridge University.
Operating under the brand name ‘Cambridge Assessment,’ the Syndicate reportedly provides education assessments for over 8m learners in 170 countries every year, marked by over 30,000 examiners!
Only two out of 213 HSC candidates from ten schools in Tanganyika failed in the 1962 UCLES Exams. 106 were awarded Full Certificates, with 105 ‘earning’ a Statement of Results… [See ‘Tanganyika Standard:’
Feb. 21, 1963]. Talk of quality education of yore – albeit for a select few – rather than thousands who go through the motions of schooling, paying lip-service to Education… Tears!