The uneducated surveys higher education

GRADUATION season is in, thousands upon thousands are rounding off the year with newly-acquired tertiary education qualifications, be they at the under or post-graduate level.

Those who yesteryear were called uneducated are today calling others uneducated and are walking around with a spring in their step that says “I have arrived!”

Unfortunately, this is a horrible misconception; education is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

In Zimbabwe today, higher education has become everything it is not: a sexy adornment to one’s persona, status symbol or a career stepping stone.

Education is uniquely human. Another unique feature of humanity is actively working to change our environment to suit our needs.

Education provides humanity with the ability to do this.

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This is because education is about acquiring a knowledge and skillset to be used to provide for our needs.

Education is, therefore, very functional and utilitarian, we only learn those things that are useful to us.

When homo sapiens mastered the use of fire, they did not just sit and bask in its heat and the glow of their own ingenuity.

They used it to cook, clear land, smelt metals, among other activities that allowed them to live with greater comfort and ease.

Fire is a tool to be used very much like education.

Animals make no effort to conquer their environment, so they learn to carry out certain activities without being educated on them.

Education is not only a repository of knowledge and skills, but is also a vehicle that nurtures and refines because humans are aspirational beings, always seeking to go further by building on the extant.

Today, Zimbabweans are obsessed with higher education qualifications out of baser considerations such as the prestige that comes from a degree, masters or PhD or the career advancement that should follow the acquisition of such.

Very few intend to use the education, most just want to stick the qualification to themselves and have them open career and social doors.

As posited earlier, education is about acquiring knowledge and skills for use.

We can take the illustrious example of Bill Gates who does not have a degree.

What he did is that he acquired through kindergarten, college and the two years he spent at university, knowledge and skills which he put to use to start Microsoft.

One does not need a higher degree to come up with an invention that saves the world or start a company.

One just needs to correctly identify the knowledge and skills to acquire in order to do so.

These can even be acquired at the elementary levels of education.

This is not to say that higher education is superfluous or a vanity project.

Higher education or the pursuit of should be premised on clearly defined career goals, skill and knowledge gaps and aspirations in order to achieve one's career goals. Education can be ineffective along two continuums.

One is when due to careerism and the allure of prestige a country’s young brilliant minds are siphoned off into the fields where their intelligence more or less atrophies.

In Zimbabwe, if a student doing sciences comes out with 20+ points, they as a rule will opt for medicine or engineering.

That is fine and very well those fields need their fair quota of geniuses.

You do not get such students signing up to do a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry or Biology or sign up for say Computer Science.

The afore-mentioned classical disciplines are the bedrock of modern civilisation, but it's just that they do not have the same prestige or allure as medicine or engineering.

The same applies in the arts, the most capable students opt for law. Those doing commercials queue up to be chartered accountants.

As a result, you do not as a rule get bright students doing the arts or humanities.

This means that these fields never seem to get the right minds to take them forward. Those that do end up in these fields it is by accident rather than design.

This quota is usually students who had put the afore-mentioned “glamour courses” as their first choices but had not been accepted.

That is why our scientists, intellectuals, writers never win say, the Nobel prizes because the minds that should be pushing Zimbabwe’s intellectual spheres are engaged in other careers.

Zimbabwe is yet to produce a world renowned philosopher, psychologist or sociologist because these disciplines are very low on the prestige hierarchy.

This situation arises again out of people viewing education as an end product and not a means of production.

The second continuum is when millions are invested in higher education but this education is received by people without the necessary intelligence to action it.

It is one thing to make higher education available for all and another to have a useful education system.

Education can be made available to all by lowering the entry requirements to the various degree programmes through a proliferation of universities.

This gives rise to the ubiquitous graduates including among airtime vendors, touts and generally anybody else who could possible care to be one.

This is not a useful education.

People acquire degrees and more or less sit on them without utilising the skills they will have acquired.

Zimbabwe is now teeming with people with PhDs and Masters degrees and yet we are not getting a proportionate return in terms of breakthrough research and inventions.

This is because as mentioned earlier education is a tool, a tool is only as useful as the person who uses it.

Useful education is conditioned upon intelligence.

It is said that Albert Einstein developed an early interest in Algebra.

At 12 years, he posited from his grasp of the latter that Mathematics could be used to explain the universe.

This is extraordinary but again Einstein was extraordinarily intelligent.

This means that by 12 years Einstein had acquired sufficient knowledge and skills to begin to form his own theories of the universe.

The key ingredients were knowledge and skills, then the intelligence to action these.

The education that Einstein had received at 12 years was more useful than what others receive at PhD level because of his intelligence.

Most of our educated in Zimbabwe are content to bask in the false glory of being educated because that is all they can do, they cannot do what Einstein was doing at 12 years with the limited education he had acquired on Algebra.

Intelligence should interact with education to produce tangible results.

The world has been transformed by brilliant minds utilising their education to make breakthroughs, it does not necessarily have to be higher education.

As aforementioned Zimbabwe has thousands of Masters graduates and PhD holders because education is now available to all and has become something of a national obsession.

It is common cause that once one enters an institution of higher learning one will at some point graduate.

Our universities are generally complicit in this respect as they are in competition to mass produce graduates as students are a source of revenue.

It is unfortunate that this latter group lacks the cognitive catalyst to do something with their education so they use it to advance in their careers, make money and for status.

At times they are even characterised by a general inefficiency and incompetence at the workplace because there is a disconnect between the qualifications acquired (sometimes through chicanery) and their cognitive ability.

In the end, the country does not benefit and even suffers through educated incompetence.

The solution to the catalogued ills afflicting our higher education sector is twofold — short term and long term.

In the short term the government should as a matter of urgency set aside funds dedicated to the nurturing of intellectual ability.

Having done this government should, after O Levels, identify high performing students and offer them State-assisted education in their areas of interest.

A student should be asked what they want to do, various career options must be explored together with the students during an interview.

Our students must be made aware that their interest in Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Economics, Psychology, Philosophy or any other subject can lead to a rewarding career if pursued with passion and intelligence.

The government should undertake to fund their studies up to post-doctoral level if needed.

This will guarantee the student the key considerations in choosing a degree programme — a rewarding career, economic success and social prestige that comes with being highly educated.

This should draw exceptional students into the less glamourous though key fields of study.

The government can enter into bonding agreements with the students to return and lecture as well as research, at government institutions and centres.

A mutually beneficial agreement can also be reached on any intellectual property generated.

In the long term the government should identify and set up a local university as a centre of excellence or elite university ie have a Zimbabwean equivalent of the Ivy Leaguers and channel its gifted learners there.

It is far much easier and efficacious to equip one university to world standards with the sure knowledge that its resources will be fully utilised than to equip a dozen where their potential is superfluous to needs.

This institution will, ideally, be highly subsidised by the government possibly even waiving all fees for students.

A small university like Harare Institute of Technology provides the ideal template.

It is small, agile and already its students have a good reputation among employers so it is doing much right in a sea of malaise.

The next step would be for the government to pour in resources, get the services of leading lecturers locally and internationally and allow the students to pursue their areas of interest and ability.

The idea is to provide the students with a learning environment that catalyses the dynamic interaction of education (knowledge and skills) and their exceptional intelligence.

The curriculum should focus on their progression in their chosen fields.

Students would be trained to grasp and think about the fundamentals in their fields of study rather than just cram them for the end of semester examinations.

Such an interaction could even in some instances preclude the need for a higher degree with them possibly achieving breakthroughs at even the undergraduate level.

An elite centre of learning has the added advantage that its name alone will do much in terms of the allure of prestige and careerism this will in its own attract high performers.

Zimbabwe needs a university for which students would figuratively kill to get into.

This generates a snowball effect as more and more gifted students will be attracted by the institute’s reputation and allure.

Zimbabwean students have shown great potential, it is now time to think outside the proverbial box and come up with ways to harness their abilities for the development of the nation.

•  Ignatius Tsuro is a commentator on social and political issues. He writes in his personal capacity.