Namibia’s tragic education system
By Shivute Kaapanda [Think Tank Africa]
In my teen years, I wanted to be a teacher, but growing up as an adult I moved away from this profession as I came to realize the tragic nature of the Namibian education and how it feeds leaners and teachers as mere consumers of knowledge without being taught or harvesting any progressive and conscious know-how from the politicised education system.
During our childhood days we often listened to the radio rhetoric of political leaders telling the nation how poverty has struck itself across Namibia due to our lack of education.
Those of us whose parents didn’t receive any formal education and were poor throughout our childhood grew up blaming our parents for not taking up their education serious despite circumstances of colonial apartheid and other historical factors.
In this era we are living today it has proven beyond reasonable doubt that education is not a solution to social and economic inequality because most of the young parents today are educated but unemployment is still high which is a clear indication that the type of education we receive in Namibia cannot for whatever reason make one to believe in it fixing an economic dilemma we find ourselves in.
In another context uneducated robbers are economically well off than graduates in economics while majority of politicians who are in the forefront of ‘Education is the key to economic prosperity’ continue to loot the country’s resources regardless of them being educated or not.
This state of affairs clearly illustrates the botchery and mockery the education system has on Namibian citizens that we all came to believe that it’s an equalizer.
Education, in its current form, has proven not to be an economic or social equalizer; we need a progressive education system, the one which produces critical thinkers and not modern day slaves. An education system that teaches students to have a slave mentality upon graduation is ineffective and often barbaric.
The amount of school drop-outs is a clear sign of the education system not being progressive and not inclusive of everyone.
How does one convince a university graduate who has been sitting at home for almost ten years without getting a formal job in the area of his or her specialization without telling them that they are bewitched?
Indeed they are bewitched by the education system because the system made them to believe that they will secure a formal job right after graduation which is a mockery of the education system.
With this botchery and mockery of citizens by the education system the analogy of university dropouts who successfully managed to rob a bank and used money to establish companies and with these companies they managed to give university students opportunities to work gives a sense of courage in a much more meaningful way given the risks taken.
When situations get tense one need to react with much more madness; it’s this madness which will liberate the whole generation.
So much good has been said about our education system for it being the key that unlocks the future of Namibians not knowing that the key in question actually locks our minds and reduces us to mere consumers of knowledge and not the producers of it.
This is so because the keys of the current education cannot liberate our consciousness and without our consciousness being liberated we can also not liberate others because we were never taught to liberate, simply because the current neo-liberal education system is married in community of property with the capitalist agenda which is linked to an ideology of vicious economic arrangements which suppress critical thinking of the masses all done in the name of current political arrangements.
– Shivute Kaapanda is a Critical theorist and Columnist from Eyanda village; he is also an Author of the book called ‘The Conscious Republic’. iskaapanda@gmail.com
