The ManicaPost
Educational Panorama
DEMOCRACY in education cannot flourish where the chief influences that drive purpose, direction and progress, in one word known as policy-making, are utilitarian ends narrowly conceived.
However, it is also true that those implementers of policy who defy authority lack enlightenment and discipline. Hot-headed masters say, ‘If they are tired of their jobs they must say it and go home.’ Perhaps such executive tempers can be understood.
Yet, it is this writer’s submission that a collision of democratic ideals amongst educational proponents from the highest to the lowest authorities infects educational liberality with illiberality. A collusion of involved parties, namely the governor and the governed, instead deepens the impact and import of collective experience.
The apparent quiet stand-off between Minister of Primary and Secondary Education Lazarus Dokora, in which school heads openly defy the minister’s orders to ban holiday lessons, incentives, enrolment interviews (schools know how many more restrictions) stifles intellectual intercourse and limits the free function of philosophical wisdom. Educational process involves the widening of the area of shared concerns, and progress in this regard, is the product of deliberation.
An education system to which stratification into conflicting ideals is allowed is fatal. Philosophers of wisdom say an education system which rests upon the supremacy of some factor or ideal over another irrespective of its rational or proportionate claims, inevitably leads progress astray.
A situation where Minister Dokora says NO to certain activities in schools and the school heads say GET LOST, makes intellectual stimulation unbalanced. Orders or policies that lack reciprocity of interest, in this case from teachers and school heads stubbornly making rigid adherence to past customs, undermine intellectual intercourse or interests of mutual interpenetration.
There is nothing nobler than reliance on the recognition of mutual interests as a factor in educational collective control.
This collective control is what characterises a democratically constituted education system. But what is the impact of an executive impasse between policymakers and policy implementers, say, between Governor and the governed?
The stand-off between the minister and his constituency, namely schools and school heads who continue to conduct enrolment interviews and clandestine holiday lessons, whether in schools or home based, where teachers run away from their stations in search of private teaching chores, is an unfortunate but unstoppable development. It creates widening rather than narrowing the distance between the honourable minister and his executive constituency.
Dialogue is needed as quickly as yesterday here.
There can never be a better time to break down this barrier in order to bring the minister and school managers into closer and more perceptible connection with one another. Now is the best time for the commander of education to secure the intellectual and emotional significance of this physical absence of democratic space with his captains and lieutenants.
The minister, who is both a wise and intelligent academic appointed by President Mugabe in his wisdom, can surely find it easy, if he wants, to enjoy freer interaction with school heads and provincial education directors. He can, if he wants, easily readjust to popular suffrage and repudiate the temptation by the governed to defy the governor which is already visibly apparent. He can easily posture himself in voluntary disposition and interest through a mode of conjoint communicated experience and wisdom. He, if he wants, is able to create a situation where each part refers his own action to that of others and to consider the views, feelings and opinions of others to give point and direction.
Such a consideration may, as every diplomatic mind would think, secure liberation of powers — powers which at this stage remain suppressed as long as the impulse of fearful resistance, if not hostility, are in play instead of being in a group which in its exclusiveness shuts out a lot of wisdom and interests.
When NASH, the National Association of Secondary Heads, seeks audience with the State President, Cde Robert Mugabe, to report or express discontent and grievances allegedly created by their principal or minister, one wonders if this is a calculated act of conspiracy or a genuinely desperate move by school heads to address a grey area of genuine exclusivity.
If school heads were not consulted on the intention to ‘‘outlaw’’ holiday lessons, paid-for enrolment interviews, new teaching re-grading criteria, changes in school sporting programmes, as they claim, clearly they have reason to worry when one man literally tells them what they have been doing for decades has suddenly come to an end. We need to, however, note that what Primary and Secondary Education Minister Dokora thinks or has up his executive sleeve may not be downright unreasonable, yet in the absence of consultation with the managers of schools (school heads), what is right and reasonable may easily smack of executive exclusion.
The National Association of Secondary Heads is right to seek audience with the highest echelon of power. They (school heads) are right to seek audience with Cde. Mugabe. He is the highest court of appeal. We all know how naturally gifted he is to arbitrate or manage organisational conflict.
School heads do not want to rebel or go on strike. They do not want to sow a seed of conspiracy against their minister’s enthusiasm to bring about radical changes in the running of schools. School heads know very well there is nothing to gain from taking a conspiracy path or confrontational insubordination. They are thinkers. They are professionals. Whenever their shoes pinch, they seek the attention of the one directly causing the pinch. If they fail, as they claim to have done, they consult His Master’s Voice. Sheer common sense, isn’t it? Provincial education directors and school heads countrywide have managed education or school for many years. They are not perfect leaders who have done everything perfectly. But those above them have a lot to learn from them. Their vast experiences in educational administration and management can and must be used to advantage, not rubbished and abandoned in favour of retrogressive stalemate.
The Dokora-school heads stand-off is counterproductive. It requires no big words to describe it.
School heads and senior directors of education are not school children or farm labourers, workers who must always be told how to do things or not to do things. It is not necessary to oversimplify this point here.
The point is simply saying these people are academics, serious intellectuals and thinkers. They are professionals. They are hugely experienced in matters of education. They need to be consulted, involved or engaged at all levels of educational planning and policy-making. Calling them policy implementers ONLY is an unforgivable mockery of their intelligence and usefulness. They run the machine. They run the show, literally. They are indestructible. They are an invaluable part of the success or failure story of education whatever angle one wants to look at them.
