As the
sun’s irradiation permeates the little Tchakalala’s oily, sudoriferous dark
skin, his pallid cracked hard lips were slightly opened, to help his breath
from the overcrowded multitude. The weary, brown t- shirt he wore was bigger
than his small, malnourished body. No one could ever agree with the fact that
the t- shirt had been pure white once, the day his uncle Tongi received it as a
governmental special gift, after he had restlessly participated in the previous
presidential elections campaign. Tchakalala could feel the insufferable heat
from the uneven, rocky ground, perforating tardily through his filthy granitic
cracked barefooted heels. He had waited with the crowd since morning and now
was noon, clapping hands, singing and cheering up to the eloquence of the
governor’s words, he could hardly decipher. This was another first day of
presidential campaign in his village. The only words, he gasped and cheered at
the most, were the ones the governor had said vehemently, “Success only comes from school. Read more. Today you are a reader and
tomorrow you are a leader. You kids stay in school, I have been there’’.
For
many years, human beings have shown and proved their uniqueness from other
species, on how they meticulously use reason and logic in analyzing any
information, details and knowledge, which surround them. We have had a complex
course of survival strategies in which some of them failed us through our
timeline. However, the process of passing knowledge from one generation to
another has been prolific and of paramount importance to us and our
environment.
According
to Cambridge Advanced learner’s Dictionary,
education is the process of teaching or learning in a school or college, or the
knowledge you get from this. Just to paraphrase, education is a process, which
involves teaching and learning at a certain place with certain environmental
conditions.
For
any public academic education to take place, few indispensable elements must be
encapsulated, which are the government, teachers and students. Looking
meticulously at the concept ‘education’, it is not just a process which takes
place at school, colleges or institutions. People teach and learn every day and
everywhere. Before getting to schools and colleges, we are already involved in
this educational process in our homes and neighborhoods, which become a society
in general. I realized that I should share with you a little about Mozambican
public academic education.
Mozambique
is a country in Southeast Africa. The capital and largest city is Maputo (known
as Lourenço Marques before independence). Mozambique is considered to be one of
the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the world. It is endowed with
the rich and expensive natural resources.
As
I mentioned earlier above that public academic education involves three
indispensable elements, the government, teachers and students. It’s logical
that for any country to have public schools and all possible facilities, which
make the education process successful, the government must invest a generous
amount of money in education sector. Ministry of education is one of the
pillars, which acts as a pivotal role in decentralization of all public
educational necessities from the center to the fringes of each society, which
make up a country. It seems as if everything is well organized and perfect,
since we have a small group of people who make up a government, and from the
government another well-organized hierarchy of small group of people, which is
the ministry of education. The both small groups are to represent, lead and
guide the masses. The problem emerges when these small groups, which lead us
claim the inexistence or shortage of money to invest in education.
Does our
government really lack money to invest in Public Education? Is education a
priority to our political leaders? What kind of education our political leaders
want us to have?
Starting
with the first question above, correcting the mistake, which many of us make by
saying, "the government lacks money". We are indirectly and
subconsciously assuming that the money belongs to the government, which is not
true. The money that the Mozambican government uses to execute any public tasks,
like building up schools and infrastructure comes from the country's wealth and
the people. Both the government and the population in general seem to forget
that all this accumulated amounts of money come from taxes and all Mozambican
wealth, including natural resources. The only function of the government is to
use this money wisely and transparent for the betterment of the people. If
Mozambique is considered one of the poorest country in the world today, it is
simply due to the mismanagement of its vast wealth and high level of
corruption, practiced by its leaders.
Public
education is not a priority to Mozambican government. The government doesn’t
want the people to get educated, because through real education, the masses
will acquire the ability to reflect on
and analyze everything, thereby asking a lot of questions about the epicenter
of their destitution and wretchedness, which may lead up to the fall of those
who are on power. It’s really sad, when the ones we call our leaders fight for
our perpetual miserableness and ignorance. One of the clear evidences of all
this neglected chaos is that all Mozambican political leaders are aware of this
unproductive educational system and corruption they are involved in. They also
have children to be educated, instead of resolving the problems they have
caused, they prefer sending their children to private schools, where they pay
the embezzled lots of money to the schools with qualified teachers and better
leaning conditions. These schools are totally independent from the government.
How contradictory does this sound? Children from the disadvantaged population
leave their poor homes every day, going to schools with dreams that one day
their future will be bright. They are motivated every time that going to school,
of course, not learning, is the only promising gesture left to change their
lives. These false motivational words come repetitively from the very same
people ruining their lives. It’s detrimental to look at a naïve skinny kid with
no shoes in his feet, walking hundred miles to reach a school where he/she is
going to share a book with five other students in a classroom of 60 students.
Due to the kid’s erroneous mental respresentation of reality, the kid has a
great deal of tenacity, since once she/ he heard the president’s speech in his
election campaign saying, ‘’ I have been there children, stay in school, today
to become what I am it’s because of myself being in school ‘’. The kid could
not grasp the idea that it’s not because of school or whatever education the
president is talking about, but it is all about him being the product of a
well-organized system of what they call survival of the fittest. Sometimes we
fail to understand the ideology that a school and education are only
complimentary terms which mean two different realities. A school is only a
formal place where knowledge can be debated and acquired. However the process
of acquiring knowledge, which is education becomes compromised if all specific
and necessary elements involved are unheeded. Meaning, the school may exist but
without any education offered from it, simply a building to imprison the
unexplored brilliant minds of our children.
On
another hand, the teachers are generally the repercussion of the government's
failure. A public school teacher is a normal civil servant citizen, as any
worker from different work sectors. Teacher is only a term to classify someone
who is a sister, brother, father or mother with a big family to take care of.
He has to be paid monthly to sustain his social, economic and biological
necessities to be alive. This is the first point, we work hard to satisfy our
daily needs for survival. Since there is too much negligence and reluctance to
investing in education sector, teachers are caught in this problem, where they
become second victims just after students. As teachers become aware of their
disqualification of their profession and underpayment by the government, there
is a great tendency of finding various ways to make the ends meet for their survival.
Some teachers start being involved in many unprolific behaviors involving
selling out tests or exams marks to the students. Unfortunately, some students
especially girls ,when they are not able to pay the stipulated amount needed by
the teachers, they end up losing their dignity by exchanging sexual favors for
good marks, which they think could provide them a better future. Absenteeism is
another problem, which can be clearly noticed. Due to underpayment, some teachers
try by all means to work at two or three different schools as a form of trying
to minimize their harsh standard of living. They just show up in public
schools, giving some work to do in which they don’t usually explain or teach to
the students, sign out and go. Someone could ask, are they all of them who do
that? But, it is not about who does and who does not. Any absence of a teacher
in a day affects severely many students’ lives.
In
all this chaos, the students are the ones to be affected the most. They spend
many years of delusional quest, hoping that one day the education they will
have acquired could open the windows to success. They wake up early in the
morning, walk long distances, spend unbearable hours without eating anything
and spend all the little money, which their poor families provide as a great
scarification but just to nourish their children’s collective delusional quest.
Most of our children from secondary schools are awakened from their delusion,
when they finish high school. They start facing great pressure from their
families on looking for a job. The family wants to see them working, helping in
family expenses to keep surviving. However, the game is not as easy as it may
seem. There is no employment guaranteed for high school students. Why? After 12
years learning, because the employment sector is quite aware of the limitations
if not ignorance of our little brothers and sisters. They hardy write or read.
The
government’s system is well woven in a way that lets the students in schools
for considerable years, distracting them from thinking about the source of
their perpetual poverty they are immersed in. However, without schools they
would vindicate in different forms, which include theft, extortion, murder,
prostitution, drug dealing and sexual violence. These acts would be a boomerang
to our political leaders and their families. The crimes I have mentioned
earlier are noticed each day, practiced by the frustration of the few, what if
the many were not caged in schools? Due to this fear of awareness from the
masses, the government does not spend its time in reforming our education system
and investing in it to be better, on the contrary, the government is in a rate
race of building many schools to the blinded masses, which become their life
prisons.
In a poor country like Mozambique,
my question would be, is education only acquired from books full of letters and
numbers? It is time to waken up our societies, to prove to ourselves that
education is vast, and it can be acquired from many sources. I have seen
successful people who never had a chance of sitting at the desk in the
classroom, some of them are enchanting and successful musicians, football
players, painters, sculptors, guitarists, singers, drum beaters , the list is
endless. Of course, we need formal education from school but if schools become
prisons of men, we better seek for other forms of education to be prosperous
and change the damages, which our leaders have caused, in order to pave a
better path for the coming generations.
"Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has
goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. So long as men die, liberty will
never perish. ....." Charlie Chaplin.
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