From this premise I propose to consider the incidence of the education or training of the youth on the development of society as a whole – the implication of training that the youth acquire, in the development of society.
I think of the youth as some entity which has to undergo “transformation” to prepare it for some role in the processes out of which society meets its needs and for the very process of societal regeneration when, in time, the youth replace grown ups whose energy and resourcefulness have diminished.
The youth may be enjoined to be responsible and reasoned in any initiative they undertake. But responsibility in posture and being reasoned in initiative arise from teachings the youth acquired from their parents and the kind and quality of education their parents and the society could give them. The question I propose for consideration is that of the creation of a context for a liveable life.
The contribution of the youth’s development in the society would not be specific things the youth should do, specific enterprise of theirs. When the youth are considered in relation to development, it is in the sense that, being the sector from which society’s personnel in the professions and all walks of life are recruited, proper education and purpose-directed training – instruments of empowerment – for the youth are sure guarantors of development.
The context:
In the era of colonial rule, in schools colonialists taught the colonised how to count and read and write. This enabled them to communicate with their subjects and to manage them as labour in the exploitation of the natural resources of the territories under their control. Later, when it arose that the colonised would have to be given independence some day, the need to get more people to go to school and for more education and in various domains arose and was addressed.
In the natural posture of the colonised, whose concerns were primitive farming, food gathering and hunting in which offspring were valued as essential labour around and the girl child was a direct event of social structure when the group married its sons, involvement in colonial enterprise was a skewed activity and was quite senseless.
A first problem of the colonialists was thus that of getting the school accepted for what it served. In the interest of the colonial economy, they resorted to inducements of various sorts and in some cases, to force.
Several decades since political independence, in the 21st century, the development of the school among us (developing countries) is still an acute problem.
Presently there seem to be very many things in the education which we get from our schools but very few of these things relate to our common needs and the resources available in nature in the environment in which we live. The result is that we get so much education but do not have options of activity in which our education can be gainfully put. In this situation, faced with the exigency of living, the individual gets into a search for activity, trying his hand in one trade today, then in another on another day and on and on.
I think that this is a waste of resources and can be avoided. Assuming that the basic school where one learns how to count and the alphabet of the language in use is available for a great majority of third world nations, the content of secondary school education and the manner of its delivery can be re-examined to see in what manner it can be tempered to make them directly relevant in the contexts in which we live. This cannot be done in isolation: it necessarily will take a critical view of what we have in our economy at a given time, and the level of development of the later.
When an individual acquires learning but cannot get into some profitable activity because he did not learn how he could put his learning into practical use, or because there simply are no sectors in the existing economy in which he could put it into use, or again and increasingly because there are no existing mechanisms in terms of policies and schemes to assist him into some activity, he resorts to trying his hand in assorted trades, and for most of the time in things for which he has no education nor training, relying on his practical sense. The prospects of success in this approach are poor and non-success leads always to discouragement, movement towards the urban centre, various unnameable activities including sex for cash, homosexual prostitution (which most third world countries still need to recognise and sensitize their people of its advantage and disadvantages), crime for wealth, gambling, idleness and the consumption of “euphoriants” and such other things.
The facts as they are:
What I see; is a scheme which has as its objective the improvement in this condition must begin from a careful consideration of the facts – the reality – at a given time. Necessarily, it would involve a consideration of the world-view of the people of a given place, distinctive activities which take place in the place, how these activities fit together, what may be the most important factor which explains the condition and the level of life in a place, communication with communities in the neighbourhood and with the nearest urban centres.
Presently I consider life in a typical country side in the rain forests of southern Cameroon. In the school the pupil learns how to read, write, and be able to count. Out of school he is part of the domestic labour. For subsistence he is a hand in farm work and sometimes in fishing and hunting. For sources of cash, the family may entertain a number of plantations of cash-earning produce like cocoa, and oil palm. Surplus food crops like groundnuts and cassava may also be sold for cash. Income from these sources enable the family to acquire some additional primary needs like fuel for their lamps, soaps with which to wash clothes, sometimes drugs for common illnesses and for some school needs for those who go to school. Let us say, we here have a typical instance of an economy of subsistence – what we would term a condition of hand-to-mouth life.
A casual examination would reveal a basic logic beneath the order of subsistence. Production is essentially for the satisfaction of first needs, namely, food for mouths to be fed, and welfare for a liveable continued subsistence.
The level of production is strictly tied to the seasons. Towards periods of rains, the fields are prepared for cultivation, and during the dry season the previous harvests are consumed. The harvests must be consumed for lack of facilities which would enable preservation and poor communication with urban centres in which they may be sold for cash. In this situation it is impossible to accumulate resources for a spread use. If preservation [and of course accumulation] were possible, this would enable the peasant to engage in wider industry and in more than one domains than the cultivation for subsistence. There would be prospects for expansion in resources, for higher levels of life and perhaps for investments for expanded production even if it would be in the domain of labour in larger-sized plantations.
What I propose:
My interest in what I have called the world-view of a people – which may be referred to as the horizon of the people is that, the common practices in relation to production are usually customary practices which have always been among the people since ancestral times. For their non-exposure to other ways of doing things, in their majority, they are not aware of the existence of other ways. Any action for development should have as an important element in its conception, a thought-out approach to a kind of education which takes into account customary approaches and the pool of wisdom in indigenous systems of knowledge.
The school in its present form needs a re-examination, and a “tuning in,” to relate it to the immediate contexts of our lives – the specific needs for life in a rain forest, according to the resources the people can readily access to in the part of the globe in which they live. This “tuning in” must needs to take into account the world-views of the different peoples of the named places and the resourcefulness of the institutions of the land.
Specific questions which may be addressed are:
Education for what?
Education for whom?
What approach to education?
Education how?
A reasoned policy on education is an urgent need for any society and should be an obsession to its leader if they are thoughtful about a meaningful legacy for posterity.
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