Our cockeyed education system

The true homeland is not just land and borders. Back in the day, there used to be four different exit points at basic education level. These were: Primary school (Standard 4) – there was an examination taken to progress to standard 5, otherwise pupils were made repeat Standard 4 until they have been moulded enough to proceed to higher classes. Then there was Standard 7 Primary School Leaving Examinations (PSLE) where pupils were expected to get a C or better for them to proceed to Junior Secondary school. Even then, not every grade C would be accepted to Junior Secondary, but only grade C+ or better. 3. JCE – during my time, this was two years, meaning one had to sit for and pass an exit exam at Form 2. Only a C+ and better could proceed to Senior Secondary School. Lastly, there was at Form 5, where students had to sit for Cambridge Overseas Schools Certificate (COSC), nowadays BGCSE. At this point students in Cambridge will be competing among and with the very best in the country. During those years, the pass rate for top five schools in Botswana was, unsurprisingly, usually between 80-93%. 

Some of those that exited at the different levels mentioned, were usually absorbed by Brigades le other vocal education training centres. The point here is that we cannot allow failed grade Ds to proceed from Primary all the way to Senior Secondary school, and still expect great results at BGCSE (Form 5) – never! 

Nowadays, it not uncommon to find a teacher marking scripts of students at high school, looking to sit the BGCSE but still getting poor marks in their mock examinations and tests. Chances are that the failed grade Ds who proceeded from primary all the way to seniors secondary will graduate high school still trying to learn how to spell their last name! 

Tertiary teacher training institutions may not be teaching trainees with skills to teach children how to read and write, with the expectation that by the time they get to high school they would have learned all that at Primary School. This automatic progression from Primary to Senior Secondary was never a smart move, and it is doubtful if it was even backed by any research. You can reduce the number of students from 45 to 20, and it would still not help much if half the class is D students who should have been exited at Primary School and channeled to other institutions where their strengths (which are not academic) would have been refined, and the student possible helped to monetize these – a great teacher propelled by producing excellent results will spend most of their time consumed with helping these special needs students, perhaps at the detriment of the other half that would have otherwise done better! 

Likewise, even the parenting style of parents nowadays may have a huge contribution, and perhaps this is something we need to discuss someday! 

The picture got worse higher up the education ladder. The commercialization of tertiary education, which saw the mushrooming of bogus “university colleges” at every corner in the city, some with addresses even on top of fuel stations created a stampede for maximising enrolments to tap into easy sponsorship millions as government panicked an started trying to send every form 5 school leaver to acquire some tertiary qualification presumably to take the youth out of the streets. This was also coupled with the propensity to loot public coffers at every opportunity by the former administration, yes some of the cabinet ministers -at least more than one education minister was linked to controversial deals with such ‘colleges’ while another’s name featured prominently in scandals involving ghost students enrolled outside the country. The urge to maximise profits annually, for these car boot school businesses, resulted in all sorts of chaos from ghost students paid sponsorship millions to enrolled cohorts being graduated to pave the way for the next enrolment without emphasis on the quality of the graduate walking out of that institution. Issues of unaccredited schools, unaccredited courses and unqualified instructors became common cause. Even in the workplace you come across such characters who claim to have graduated from these bogus institutions, then you begin to appreciate that our problems as a country a deeper than we think!