Opinion Column
Mass means the tangible part that theory tries to verbalize. No education is about dreams but dreams may be about education which must translate into practical application of knowledge.
It turns out that even principles and policies are not just theoretical speculation, but an effort to put into practice human values and futuristic visions.
Student according to the Department of higher education and training (DHET) are not allowed to wear head gears in the exam rooms but they do so during formative, diagnostic and ICASS tests. You cannot stop agonizing about this idiotic visionary impairment. What is the message that this dichotomy of treatment cast to the student body? It is like blowing hot and cold hoping to achieve either cold or hot. But why the confusion of blowing both because they will cancel each other?
Africans unlike Muslims and Christians have little to attach to religion except a self-constructed conscious sense of belonging to these two religions and occasionally falling back to African culture when things get tough. It is running with the hair and hunting with the hound. Government functionaries in TVET colleges may not want to agitate strikes by denying student to attend classes with head gear running down the face to conceal a student s’ identity: when no government regulation forces them to do so, they fall back to their original fixation of don’t care. No expensive clothing, not even western attire that lecturers wear can replace the moral fabric colleges are charged to discharge.
Nations and races that forges ahead in education of value understand that the final achievement intended should be precisely defined and communicated. It follows that contradictory practices amount to strained moral integrity and lack of reason to convince those that you purport to lead.
The modern hypocrisy in educational circles is evidenced by educated people with the highest confusion to degrees unknown hitherto. They teach honesty but specialize in mischief. They teach knowledge but have very little to do with it.
Schools and colleges are understood as grooming ground for young people to adopt to the cultural and intellectual human world, but what if schools and colleges cannot see trees for words. Do you expect confused folks to rescue the situation when whimsical planning overburdens them?
It is not that our colleges in particular need new lecturers and syllabi, No. What is needed is humble leadership that is a slave of visionary dreams with an intention to practical implications- Not confusion born of corruption and mediocrity.
If education beneficiation cannot be measured by positive impact on the ground, it is useless and its actors relegated to just mere public clownery. Their victims cum students will only be impressed but not with useful mental imprints.
The biggest problem in our colleges as it is in our communities is lack of character, confused religiosity and inability to think with the end in sight; this twined with the failure to see the beginning at the end of a circle or a year, makes every year a shoot and miss battle ground where dog eats dog because of a void of natural leadership.