Education

Desmond Tutu said: “When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land”

Perhaps, when the educationists also came, they had the textbooks and we had raw skills and competences that they were painfully desirous of. So instead of helping us to brush those competences, they said ‘Let us help you reform your livelihood.’ They placed their occupations on us, and set high-ceilinged minimum academic requirements for them.

It was part of a scheme to kill our creativity and to make us hate what we had, to cause us to step up the race for their high-priced institutions of higher education, creating too many paper holders competing for too few jobs. Jobs that should only require high school diplomas, but no, they’ll ask for degrees or even higher preferred qualifications, so the race and rat race continues.

Some folks will spend the largest part of their lives studying for qualifications that will only earn them salaries resembling an offering plate, far less than the cost of some of their college textbooks. They won’t tell me they did it for intellectual fulfilment and not necessarily for monetary gains, because I know, and I have seen them change jobs like musical chair contestants, apparently looking for better earnings.

These educationists told us “Education is the key to success in life”, but they never made it clear that education and success are not always indoctrinated through an education institution. They made us narrow education to classrooms and lecture halls, instead of being just the desire and passion for knowledge.

They created confusion between brilliance and academic success, and made our schooling in such a way that it became an obstruction to unfettered education. Ultimately, some of us get schooled to feel intellectually superior to everyone, pretending to be experts in everything, from topics relating to the beginning of the universe to untold accounts of what provoked Adam into eating that apple; and even topics that they've had no involvement or factual research on.

‘Wye Olof Njie Neh Kui Sangor Lamegne Bess Bo Nopay Rafleh.’

In fact did you see what they’re coming up with? ‘Competency-based hiring practices’ they call it, and since ‘competency’ was the key word that their failed experiment never taught us, we’ll graduate with our As, honours and PhDs but devoid of the capacity to create decent employment, instead we’ll become red carpet job seekers, or end up working for employers who either never went to college or dropped-out of college to take risks aimed at building their dreams.

See who’s on Christina Aguilera’s payroll for instance, you’ll be amazed, and she never went beyond high school to get educated in the art singing and songwriting. Richard Branson got educated the hard way. John Carmack who cofounded Id Softwar and Scott Carpenter the astronaut both didn’t go to any of Babylon’s fancy universities. Britain’s John Major and Winston Churchill didn’t go to any school for political scientists; and I am sure you’ll feel me if you Google the likes of Charles Dickens, George Eastman, R. Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, Jack London, Karl Menninger the psychiatrist, and so on.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to justify the shallow didactic achievement that I attained from the “University of Mbedokang” - If I can borrow that from ST Da Gambian Dream, and I am not saying education cannot play a role in changing human performance, or cannot transform empty minds to open minds, but limiting education to decades-long classroom engagements, reading textbooks authored by celebrated autodidacts, completing school assignments and collecting degrees is what cheeses me off.

If you ask me, let the dancer, the musician, the sportsman, the comedian, and the rest be educated in their various arts and in their own ways. You never know, some of these jobless lawyers, underprivileged professors, accountants who cannot balance books, auditors that cannot express an opinion, clumsy engineers etc, that the failed experiment is creating may end up struggling to be on their payrolls.

Phew! What a long post…My apologies!