SYSTEM FAILURE

It is the early hours of January 27. Just like I do every other day, I am trekking to the school's campus. On arriving the campus on this fateful day, I came across two graduating students who seemed to be inspecting their final project pending final review. This project of theirs was a door with a built in metal detector. At first, I was really excited. I had always heard of amazing projects being carried out by Cameroonian students but I had never seen one with my own eyes. This was finally the opportunity I had, or so I thought. After thinking for a while and doing a quick web search, that excitement died a natural death. One could say my initial joy had indeed turned to sadness. Why? you may ask. Metal detectors date as far back as the 19th century. Since then, there has been some amazing upgrades which have seen this piece of technology become a vital part of security in the world over. This is what really bothered me. In as much as it is important for students to test their practical knowledge by building such projects, it is not really helpful in anyway. I don't think parents send their kids to Engineering Schools only for them to reproduce technologies which are more than a hundred years old. These kind of projects should rather serve perhaps as assignments for students. The point I am trying to make here is innovation; solving real world problems and not simply replicating the solutions of already solved problems. Even if you have to replicate it, there should still be some sort of improvement in the functionality of your model compared to the previous one. You should be dealing with an issue that was not dealt with in prior models. This is not in any way to downgrade the hard work these students put into these projects but rather, to bring to light the fact that replication does not drive the economy forward, but innovation does. It only helps the system produce outdated graduates. Engineers who are already useless before they even get into the job market. As an example, there are a lot of offices, shops and buildings which have this sort of technology installed in them. So, you building a new one only adds one more metal detector to the already existing stock. This is the same thing with most of the projects developed by students in Cameroon. Building a traffic light system or a 3D printer will only get us so far. This is the failure of the education system in most of Africa.

Often times, students are only trained to pass exams and obtain degrees which they cannot defend. They are trained to simply replicate the results of other students who passed through the system many years before them. No innovation at all. A high school student asks his/her teacher about the application of the subject matter in real life and the best answer he gets is "solve these problems and pass the GCE". Pass and then what? At the level of university, lecturers confine students to solve problems only by the method they have been taught and to them they are nurturing the next generation of problem solvers. Rather the opposite! They are nurturing the next generation of unemployable problem causers. They are constructing stereotype idiots who have no real problem solving skills. The same lecturer copies notes word for word from a foreign textbook, attaches his name to it and then distributes to students as though they were his original work. What better expression of plagiarism and hypocrisy could we have than this? If our so called PHD holders cannot make their own notes or even give students the latitude to solve problems by different methods, then we must be going down the path of total self destruction and annihilation. Unfortunately, such practices have eaten too deep into the system to a point where it will take considerable effort to rejuvenate the system. This will come at the expense of economic growth which either ways, we still won't achieve at this point. This will require the involvement of all stakeholders(government, schools, students and parents), a huge financial investment and a total cleansing of the education system at the administrative level which involves the training of new school administrators with modern methods and the modification of the teaching methods. Are we even ready for this? Would governments be willing to put in the necessary resources to get us out of this mess? Perhaps they are so blinded by their own interests that they don't even see the problem at hand. Maybe it is just mere ignorance or perhaps they are simply ignoring the problem. Whatever the case, real and sustainable growth will only be achieved when we are willing to lay aside our ego and make such sacrifices for ourselves, our children and the future generations to come.