Why the smartest people at ‘The Hill’(Makerere) are the ones who sing, dance, and act. Recently, as happens around this time of year, the news was full of the star performers in the various exam results released by the Uganda National Examinations Board (Uneb). When you are among the top students in your primary leaving, O-Level and A-Level exams, you are sure a photo of you smiling or hugging a parent, will accompany a story of your good self waxing about how you want to be a brain surgeon will be played big in the newspapers. However, something strange then happens. In perhaps the most important examination, the one that reveals whether you made it to be the brain surgeon you wanted to be when Daily Monitor interviewed you six years ago, there will be no journalists. The media doesn’t cover final university exam results. And when you think of it, at first there doesn’t seem to be a good reason why. But there is. The university is a brutal place. When you are in primary school or secondary school, you are not old enough to suffer a meaningful heartbreak. At university, you do. Your boyfriend or girlfriend will either cheat on, or dump you in ways that will shatter you seriously for the first time. In primary and secondary school, you don’t feel it much when you come from a poor family. At university, it’s rubbed into your nose daily. In your primary or secondary school, you compete with your town, district, or region. At university you compete nationally, and these days with other students from East Africa. And, in your final year, is when it dawns on you that you settled for Biology major, and didn’t make neuro-surgeon. Then the real killer: When you leave your final year, it is when the rubber of your life meets the road. You made it through primary school, secondary and high school, and university. In Uganda today, the chances that you are going to be jobless are nearly 50 per cent. Then the conversation changes. You are told that you are unemployed because the education system is “still colonial”. That the subject you studied is “not practical”. You will hear the President speaking about how it is a waste of time to study History. You should have studied Engineering. And if you studied Engineering, you will be told that, well, you studied a lot of Engineering theory, not enough practical stuff. So how might education be more useful? I don’t think the answer is in the barren and, honestly, silly debate about whether the sciences are more marketable or useful than the arts and social sciences. Rather it’s what you do with your education. How you apply it. The best example for this, in Makerere University at least, is in a place where no one ever looks. It is at what was once, and probably still is, the most despised course at Makerere University – Music, Dance, and Drama (MDD). The most tired and small-minded joke on Makerere Hill for years is that MDD stands for Musiru Dala Dala (he/she is very stupid). However, MDD is the only course at Makerere that teaches you to be what you learn. You learn to act, and you act. You learn to sing, and you sing. You can study to be a doctor, but you need someone else, a patient, for you to be a doctor. You can study to be a lawyer, but you need a criminal, crook or a journalist in trouble on the other side for you to be a lawyer. No one will pay to watch you being a lawyer, doctor, engineer, or teacher. But people will pay to watch you sing or act. So what lessons do we learn from the people who brought us MDD? Well, that it is okay to study literature, for example, but what is equally necessary to learn is how to write books that people want to read, how to pitch them to publishers, or even how to self publish. The biggest problems with lawyers in Uganda, and most places, is that lawyers are hopeless managers at running their chambers and making money out of being good lawyers. Quite a few lawyers make money from going against the law – robbing their clients, and gaming the system. All stuff they didn’t learn at law school. This is a global problem, and one attempt to tackle it in primary and secondary school is the evolving “Middle Years Programme” (MYP). A wiser man described MYP as “a framework of academic challenge that encourages students to embrace and understand the connections between traditional subjects and the real world, and become critical and reflective thinkers”. Yes, it is important what you study. However, what is far more important is what what you study makes of you. Damn, can’t believe I wrote that.
Posted on: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 06:34:38 +0000
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