Whose Education is it anyway?

Chika Ezeanya writes:

Guinea Schoolgirls courtesy ChikaforAfrica

Education ought to empower an individual to master the peculiarities of his surroundings and afford him the tools to improve on it qualitatively. In essence, what might be considered knowledge in a certain part of the world could amount to useless information in another. Take for instance a teacher in faraway northern Nigerian teaching his elementary school pupil under the perpetual year round heat that the four seasons of the year are; fall, winter, spring and summer. The confusion the pupil will encounter is such that will take him a very long time, if at all, to decipher what the word ‘season’ implies, owing to the lack of correlation with his environmental reality. While the example given may seem implausible, such, form the bulk of what is widely disseminated as knowledge in the continent of Africa today.

It cant be imported:

The problem is not in the acquisition of western education; the problem lies in the fact that Africans have lost their identity. Like a man in a borrowed suit a size or more too big or too small, Africans continue to struggle in the ill-fitting apparel, pointing accusing fingers, first to the tailor for not being magnanimous enough to make the suit fit a second person; or maybe to themselves for being be too fat and needing to go on a diet, or too thin and needing to gain a pound or two; or could it be the fault of the fabric, but how come it fits the original owner so perfectly well, then? The answer, which Africans have never come to accept, is that the suit does not fit because it does not belong to them. Western education was made to measure for the individualistic culture, the environmental dynamics and the extreme weather conditions of the west. The educational system should be overhauled in a simple and inexpensive re-evaluation of curriculum, process and system carried out by Africans who understand the nature of the issues at stake. A practical combination of African values should be merged with international standards, in order for the continent not to loose out in this era of extreme globalization.

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