Let's think and think and think

Let's think and think and think
By Editor
Sunday August 03, 2008 [04:00]

A society which values its future affords the highest priority to providing quality education for all its young people. Education should not only become a real budgetary priority; it should also become a priority in the minds, words and actions of our leaders. And our leaders should invest substantial political influence and technical ability to revamp our education system and upgrade performance levels. We say this because education is increasingly seen as the most important catalyst for development. The low level of educational achievement of most of our workforce, if not corrected, will seriously undermine our country’s development potential. Education is one of the most effective ways to empower the poor.

There is urgent need to reform our education system. But reform will not happen without effective political leadership and widespread social involvement.

It is true – and Copperbelt University Vice-Chancellor Professor Mutale Musonda’s observation is correct – that university education in Zambia has not grown to the desired levels due to lack of adequate investment.

The education of our youth is a critical challenge facing our nation today. We must undertake education of the youth seriously and treat it as a top priority if we are to produce the kind of men and women so desperately needed by our age – men and women not only of high culture but of great personality.

And as we had stated in yesterday’s editorial comment, ignorance is the root of many ills. Knowledge must be the fundamental ally of nations that aspire, despite all their tragedies and problems, to become truly emancipated, to build a better world.
We need many clear ideas and many questions about how the future of our country can be, or will be.

Of course, every period and every nation will need increasingly well-prepared, increasingly able leaders. It’s a new world that is emerging now. We have to adapt to this world, we should continue to adapt, and we should be learning what to do. And quality education will be very important in all this. We need to develop sentiments of solidarity, political awareness, and values that have immense power.

We have to develop our human capital and learn to survive by it. With human capital, we can help many people, with our experience we can do that, and with that experience we can help ourselves.

And we say this with confidence because this country made very serious advances in education within a few years of independence and was able to share this, educate many citizens of Botswana – a country that was very poor in the 1960s and 1970s and did not have enough schools, colleges or a university, many Zimbabweans, Namibians, South Africans, Malawians and many others from troubled African countries of the time – without charging a ngwee.

Let’s think and think and think about our education and about everything; let’s think about alternatives. The habit of looking for alternatives and choosing from among the best of them is a very good habit.

Now, we have to develop and educate a complex society and see what comes of it. We have to discover talents. Who knows how much genius, how much talent there is among our people? We harbour the theory that talent is everywhere, if not in one thing then in another – for computers or for music or for engineering or mechanics. Genius is common and some have it in one thing and some have it in another.
We need to develop a new generation that is going to have three or four times the knowledge that those in the generation that fought for our independence had, and more or less, over three times the knowledge of our second generation of leaders. And the new generation should know at least two and half times what the current generation does.
If we achieve this, more people will come here to see the social development of this country, the social achievements in this country than our Victoria Falls, our wildlife in the national parks of Mfuwe, South Luangwa, Lower Zambezi, Kafue and so on and so forth.

We have no sensible alternative but to create human capital, and human capital is not created with egoism, or by stimulating individualism in society.

We should aim, as a nation, to achieve levels of knowledge and culture, on average, that will be, if we look at it as a marathon, several laps ahead of many countries in our region on our continent behind us, and we say this without chauvinism. We detest chauvinism – we like criticism, and constant criticism. Every time we talk about what we have done, we should express shame and embarrassment for not having done more; every time we use things or formulas we have discovered, we should express shame and embarrassment for not having discovered them earlier; every time we take advantage of new possibilities, we should confess our sadness at not having been able to have those experien knowledgeable, a society moving ahead at an increasingly swift rate, swifter than ever, towards the multiplication of its knowledge in every field: philosophy, politics, history, science, the arts and so on and so forth. Everything should be moving forward, because we should now be able to acquire an awareness of the possibilities of modern technological methods for multiplying knowledge.

All this cannot be done, cannot be achieved except on the basis of principles, on the basis of ideas, on the basis of the ethics. It’s the only way. We should believe in the human being, in his or her ability to acquire an ethic, a conscience.

Looked at it in this way, it becomes easier to appreciate why Prof Musonda is saying that the problem of funding is not so much a question of limited availability of funds but conviction in the value of investing in education. There is need for our public universities to be properly funded so that they can continue offering quality education needed to produce competent human capital needed in the development of our country.