School matters?

Dear Kochiwe It has been another frustrating week of job hunting. No responses to any of my emails and as you can likely guess, zero interviews lined up. As I write this I am looking at my university graduation gown that I hung on the wall by me bedside. It’s not hanging there as a souvenir of an accomplishment but as a reminder that my son deserves better. I am grateful for all the efforts made by my family to send me to university. I treasure the trophy degree that sits with all the other certificates I have acquired in life. First was the birth certificate, my baptism certificate (it had to be documented?). A grade 7 certificate hasn’t really helped much in life but I have one just to prove I wrote the exams. I could go on with the list but let me get back to the point of my letter – let’s save the certificates for another day. I asked every family member who has ever contributed to my highly acclaimed education and English accent to send me a breakdown of the cost of educating me. You see it wasn’t just dad who contributed to my education. My sister Barbara, my brother Christopher, my brother Francis as well as my dear aunt Alice all contributed to the ultimate university degree. That again is another story for another day – let’s call it African Tax. Back to the summary of sending me to school, none of my relatives could give me a precise figure. They had all done it out of love and had not attached a price tag to it. I was all the more grateful for the certificates after this revelation. So I decided to do a bit of digging. I asked parents with children who were born between 2007 and 2019 how much they had budgeted for their children’s education or if they knew how much they would spend on educating their children all the way up to university. None of them had a budget and were taking it a day at a time. One out of five parents had an estimated figure of how much he would spend on his daughter’s education. Please stay with me I am going somewhere with this line of thought. Education is considered an investment. When people invest, they know precisely how much they are putting into a venture. The idea here is obvious- you want to know if you have made a profit or if you are running a loss. If we don’t know precisely how much it will cost to educate our children, how then do we ascertain that education is actually an investment? At the end of the day do we only want out children to get good jobs after the university degree? If they do get the good job, how much are they getting as a salary plus benefits? Is it a profit or a loss? The question here is – does education guarantee a return for the money that parents and relatives plough into education every day? I think not. I will tell you why. To prove my point I will take it very close to home. Zimbabwe has an estimated unemployment rate of 90%. Granted Zimbabwe has other problems but if we compare this to a well-documented (perhaps unnecessarily celebrated) literacy rate of 75% (really?) doesn’t this defeat the whole point of education? How many educated, intelligent and JOBLESS people have we met? The funny thing is that I have actually seen people with zero education (maybe grade 7) being more successful in life than those with the fancy scroll. I believe there is something missing in the way we educate our children or rather are allowing our children to be educated. Knowing the theory is great but how do we turn that knowledge into wisdom? To begin with, we need to think differently. Unlearn what we have been told to be true. Not every educated fool is going to get a good job and recover the thousands if not millions spent on sending them to school. What I would love to see for my child is an education system that teaches him how to hustle. Once he is out of the school system, he has to learn to think independently. Maybe independent thinking is coming too late into the lives of our young people. A friend recently said “we need to add street life, hustling or dealing to our education curriculum otherwise we will always have the mentality of getting a job after school”. I have a lot more to say on this topic but for now let me get back to trolling the internet, see what jobs have been advertised. An email just came through telling me that my proposal for that business idea I had has not been approved. So I guess its job hunting all the way until I too have unlearned what I have been told to be true. I will write to you soon. Your friend always, Rhetoric Africa.