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NewsDay

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Education for education’s sake no longer useful

Opinion & Analysis
It is disturbing that Zimbabwe churns out 21 000 college graduates every year, 90% of whom end up in the wilderness for lack of employment.

It is disturbing that Zimbabwe churns out 21 000 college graduates every year, 90% of whom end up in the wilderness for lack of employment.

NewsDay Editorial

We can imagine the agony experienced by these young, energetic people full of hope who discover, to their horror, that the years they put into study were just a waste.

The problem of unemployed graduates is multi-faceted. While we acknowledge that the onus is largely on the government to create jobs, we should also blame the curriculum that has failed to change with times.

Today’s world is changing at a fast pace and it is important that the curriculum is designed in such a way that it adapts to the community’s ever-changing needs.

The curriculum has to be relevant and it should change over time to satisfy both the learner’s and society’s needs. A survey in the informal sector today shows that a number of university graduates are learning new, useful skills for survival that are completely divorced from what they learned in college.

This should be a sign that the old college curriculums are no longer useful for the learner. It is a pity that we still have a curriculum that emphasises on job-hunting by the graduate rather than job-creation. The massive number of yearly graduands should tell us that we are now embarking on education for education’s sake.

What the country needs is outcome-based education whose philosophy is the empirical measurement of a student’s performance. Gone are the days when one could earn a living largely by arguing about issues.

Today’s world calls for both thinkers and doers; our curricula have failed to produce such people. Our point of departure should be a clear vision of what we want our society to be, then develop a curriculum that equips students with skills to transform their lives and society at large.

The current scenario where degrees and diplomas are of no use to those who possess them should ring a warning bell. We need sober curriculum designers who understand the situation and ensure schooling is not divorced from society.

As long as we remain mired in traditional philosophies of education that place emphasis on inputs such as books per student, hours spent in school and the number of graduates churned out, education will never assist in solving the unemployment puzzle.

We should have a curriculum that targets outcomes such as relevant skills and knowledge acquired by the learner, reduction of unemployment and the creation of jobs/industry by college graduates.

Students should be assessed against relevant objectives that lead to social and economic transformation rather than on their academic achievements, as is the case now.

As long as we force the current, largely irrelevant curriculum on our graduates, we should forget about the much-touted idea that education reduces unemployment. It will continue to do the opposite.