Number of words: 448

There is need on part of parents and public to return to the traditional values of the past. With the social sciences occupying centerstage today only because they are capable of empirical proof to a certain degree, we have devalued man, subjecting him to the same evidence that the physical sciences dictate. This has elevated material determinants as the guiding spirit of all education. A vocational curriculum is preferred to a liberal education for the same reason. Why we remain forgetful of the past, that productivity is more the result of a social attitude and educational training, even if education is a part of society. It is in this social attitude that remedies must be sought. Honesty and integrity need to occupy a higher place in education than they do now via liberal education must take its claim as well making vocational studies an effective construct later on.

In a significant move, Zambia closed all vocational schools within a year of independence. The authorities argued that however desirable they might be from the perspective of a manpower planning, politician and parent, they embody a principle of differentiation that only those who benefit from it are likely to find appealing. The school is a filter not a dam. It is however possible to maintain belief in the myth that education is a social leveller. For society, the numbers that pass through the filter from the bottom to the very top, are so small that the very fact of their success bestows its own legitimacy and keeps them apart from the mainstream, giving a lie to the assumption that an expansion of vocational education will necessarily make the country more democratic. Democracy depends less on education than on strong political determination to make it so.

We cannot forget that many of the problems that beset education today are due to false ethical standards. For production means not only the economic prosperity of a nation, as the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few people with vested and often selfish interests. Manipulation of results in an examination, for instance, is a behavioral symptom of this malice. We will not find any solutions on the micro level and the spate of experiments now being tested in educational laboratories throughout the world to provide better types of questions and more reliable grading systems, will not do much to improve matters. Even internal assessment, on which so much hope is being placed as providing a complement to the raw marks, can only introduce temporary technical controls. It’s only a change at the macro level that will provide a permanent solution.

Excerpted from pages 186-187 of ‘Examinations: An Informative Update’ by M Mascarenhas.