MoE Picks the Right Choice of Education to Fight Poverty

The Ethiopian Ministry of Education (MoE) took a bold step toward a new general education curriculum reform geared towards changing public education to improve quality standards, focused on practical education in science and technology, entrepreneurship, indigenous knowledge, and relevance. The reform also focused on outputs, such as experts and professional graduates who can engage in entrepreneurship immediately after graduation. MOE made it compulsory and ensured that every child should receive a primary education up to eighth grade funded by the government. MoE promised at least one free meal a day to elementary grade students, which was rarely available with special provisions to some students, a big responsibility for a developing country like Ethiopia with a steep increase in elementary students in the last 12 years. The purpose of the educational reforms is to transform the school structures to raise the quality of education in a country.

However, in my opinion, a nation's educational reforms are a vast undertaking. It deserves a holistic examination of its reasons, objectives, application, and implications for the systems and the community served. Thus, I volunteered my expertise, thoroughly examined the 64 pages of the PPT, and jotted down my take on it. I considered the problems as gaps created through many years of neglect and abuse. However, I commend the current government for picking up the pieces and making sense of openly visible culprits.

I agree with the MoE problem statement (PPT-p6 and p20) of gaps in the education system and the curriculum, poor education quality, and nonaligned relevance. The symptoms are poor student learning, teachers' quality and motivation, the breakdown of morals, the inconvenience of teaching, and the country's unmet workforce needs. MoE also rightly sited that education mainly focused on content, not including indigenous knowledge and that the education was unrelated to the life and livelihood of the students and the community. Education was void of substance; at least our education system was not serving our national interest but the interest of other nations. In general, Ethiopia is good at importing products from outside, including knowledge, and Ethiopia is also good at exporting educated brains to different countries, especially to the west. Until recently, Ethiopia was one of the few nations where free movement of knowledge exchange remained underutilized.

One of the root causes of the problem of the education system in Ethiopia is the absence of the meaning of the "indigenous knowledge" and the vertical and horizontal systems that will allow the free flow, transmission, accumulation, and reservoir of indigenous knowledge in the nation. The dynamics of knowledge transmission and acquisition, or how different aspects of knowledge capital are passed from one individual to another and how they are acquired and embodied by individuals, are central to the education of a nation. In small-scale societies, knowledge, in general, is primarily acquired early in life through observation, imitation, and other forms of social learning embedded in daily experiences. However, in Ethiopia, this part of the process was done by traditional schools like Madrassa and the church. That process has been abandoned and segregated from public education. Thus, the reform needs to indicate how indigenous knowledge is integrated with modern education, accumulated, or transmitted to the next generation and vertically and horizontally structured throughout the learner's lifetime and stages of consciousness.

Ethiopians have been the product of the Nile Civilization since BC. With decades of personal experience combined with their ancestors, the indigenous people of Africa harbor vast knowledge about the environment and the ecological relationships within them. Tremendous opportunities existed where such knowledge contributed to modern science and natural resource management. However, we never were the beneficiaries, which has to stop now. Some people may generally distinguish between scientific and indigenous knowledge by claiming science is universal, whereas indigenous knowledge relates only to particular people and their understanding of the world. However, integrating indigenous knowledge into science curricula makes it possible to apply common thinking and problem-solving strategies. Indigenous Ethiopians played a vital role in safeguarding and preserving natural processes and transmitting and preserving that knowledge at the beginning of science and discovery: today's medical doctors were the monks of yesterday in a monastery. Monks in Ethiopia know about Ethiopia's endemic plants better than a biology graduate specializing in Botanic from any of the universities, foreign and domestic. The untapped knowledge of these monks should be encouraged and solicited to contribute to educating our students about endemic plants. Their knowledge could be used to classify endemic plants in the global scientific catalog and develop educational artifacts for plant science.

The second most important factor in the education system is the consistency of the system. In contrast, its purpose ensures same standards are used in the system to produce intellectuals and evaluate the quantity and quality of education results. Consistency is arguably essential when working to accomplish goals. Without consistency, programs are unorganized; the body has a more challenging time adapting and forming habits of useful intellectual products. For example, why not start science from the first grade? Identifying flowers and plants in your backyard can be a good start for a first grader to learn about the rudimentary science procedure, along with starting Latin and other alphabets. Remember, the three most critical cornerstones, Creativity, Communication, and Collaboration (3C), are recommended to be taught starting from kinder care. An effective curriculum also includes the consistent but smooth flow of well-aligned programs from the lower grade to the higher ones. Students should not be subject to too many unknown elements at a juncture. Many students are lost in the transition, afraid of the unknown. Predictability of the process should be maintained as much as possible even though education rigor for actions of the system otherwise.

Within the consistency context, the most lethal factor in the education system is a relatively peaceful environment. Schools should be considered the most sacred place where peace and quietness are essential to the school climate, protected by the highest law on the land. Keeping ourselves and our families physically safe is the most crucial element of human survival, but it's also vital to our ability to thrive. Without a sense of physical safety – individually and more broadly as a community – we cannot focus on learning. School grounds may not be used for government activities other than bringing the community for activities that benefit the school.

A central factor lightly mentioned in the reform was the participation of family, community, and experts. These are essential personalities that could make or break the success of education. These personalities' role also decreases and diminishes during role handover and adulthood. A school without the participation of the triad is a neglected school, just like an orphan child trying to make it without needed help to thrive. Thus, schools should require the active participation of parents, the community, and experts. The school also should guarantee the participants for better products to enhance community life.

MoE also mentioned the decline of student learning support, the problem of teachers' competence and interest, the ethical system of schools, and the failure to complete the learning and teaching process. These are complex issues that need to be addressed on the societal level. Improving the life of teachers is long overdue. However, that cannot be accomplished without improving the living condition of the general public. The complexity gets harder when asking teachers to do more with less. The government should, and I hopes, facilitate accommodating teachers' requests for reasonable compensation within the margin of the nation's economy. It is in their best interest that they work together in unison. Because they have the same goal to achieve, producing better, competent, and patriotic citizens that will guarantee Ethiopia to be an independent, peacefully cooperative, and self-sufficient nation.

MoE mentioned improving a costly infrastructure. In my opinion, the renovation process is planned based on past needs and requirements. This reform should gear towards communal facilitation of education, and not education run in isolation as we did in the past. We hope that in this reform, education will remain a proactive mechanism to bring real education to the community and bring students closer to the actual community problem. These changes need to adjust the class size, and the student & teacher ratio adds the equation of parental and community participants about their roles in the new curriculum. Thus building a new and expensive school at this time is premature and untimely. The funds can be used to retain teachers, orient parents, and required community partners to start the new plan.

My scribble at this time highlighted the significant part of the gap that needs immediate attention. Reforms with this kind of glitches resulted in complications that later needed major lifelong corrections. One quick fix to many gaps described is applying logic facilitated Project Based Learning (PBL) throughout the educational system, starting from the first grade to the university. It is easy to follow, consistent, and continuous, and the result is measurable at any juncture of the education system. It is a data-driven, fact-based, logic-supported curriculum fit to educate any locality, collective, or population state. Logic-supported Project-Based Learning is a teaching method that allows students to develop knowledge and skills by engaging them in projects designed around problems and issues they may encounter in the real world. Project-based learning (PBL) is a teaching method in which students learn by actively participating in real-world and personally meaningful projects.

I hope the development of the new textbooks considers my current scribbles. I could not provide a complete critique of the books at this time due to a lack of access to one. I hope to do that when I travel to the country these days.