Alagi Yorro Jallow
The Gambia’s education system was a monumental error of the first republic and second republican era. Our education system has produced mass under-performers (the D- generation); limiting choices and stifling the careers of many a youth. That the system exists to-date is an indictment of the political elite, a majority who vehemently opposed it during both administrations. We must endorse the bold efforts by our education ministry to overhaul the current teaching ‘pedagogy’ of the suppressed. We must embrace proposed changes in our education system?
Education equality is the hallmark of a fair society; it is the greatest equalizer in society. And as such, it is a great injustice to turn it into a commodity. As United States Activist Professor Angela Davies has consistently stated, the commodification of education under dictates of capitalism is increasingly viewed by progressive activists as an obscenity.
At a time when education is under siege by market mentalities and moralities, there is an urgent necessity to reclaim the academy in its multiple forms as a site of critique and a public good, one that connects knowledge and power, scholarship and public life, and pedagogy and civic engagement. The current assault on our education system by the apostles of neo-liberalism makes it clear that it should not be harnessed to cost-benefit analyses which often lead to loss of egalitarian and democratic pressures.
There’s no real political willpower to change the poor education situation in the country. It started decades ago after independence and during post Yahya Jammeh era when intellectuals were exiled or detained and replaced with foreign teachers and lecturers who does not have the requisite teaching pedagogy. The brain drain of doctors from the Gambia is matched by that of lecturers and good teachers. Name any of the top intellectuals in Gambia – they are either teaching in universities abroad or working with NGOs.
Technology can never replace teachers, yet this move to replace the teacher or the teacher’s interaction with students is pushed on schools for poor students, while the rich kids get individual attention from teachers in technologically efficient classes with a minimum number of students. It’s the same as with the doctors, where government sings about machines it bought for hospitals, as if machines can diagnose and treat. Technology replaces skills that are repetitive and need automation. But until we invent a human being, technology can never replace the instinct to read and respond creatively to individual or new situations.
There are business interests that profit from the skills gap. One is the consultancies getting a lot of donor funds (why does the World Bank show up everywhere?) to train students in university in the name of bridging the skills gap. The other, huge interest is the tech companies. Instead of investing in pedagogy (the science of teaching) and in improving teachers’ tech skills, we’re shoving laptops in the hands of kids but not of their teachers. Which is essentially showing the middle finger to teachers and to the profession.
It is such a waste of money for our country to invest in training expertise, and then when the professionals try to contribute, the business people and politicians frustrate us by denying us resources, then spend money on tenders for machines in the name of replacing our skills, and then say we’re a burden on the wage bill. We must fight for a better Gambia where professionalism is respected and used as a resource to serve the nation.
Our school system especially the tertiary institutions should be about more than developing work skills. They must also be about producing civic minded and critically engaged citizens – citizens who can engage in debate, dialogue and bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, urgency, ethics and collective resistance. This system of poor education we have created over the last two and half decades of neo-liberal capitalism. And we can change it. Will it be easy to change it? No, it won’t be easy.
