Daily News
By Maxwell Sibanda
18 September 2010
HARARE – Education, Arts, Sports and Culture minister Senator David Coltart has urged political parties and rural communities to stop violence against teachers during campaigns like the current constitutional making programme.
“All those responsible for violence and killing in rural communities are actually killing the teaching profession and destroying the education of our children.Teachers are perceived as opposition party supporters and most rural communities have always turned against them,” Senator Coltart said.
The Minister was speaking in Harare recently during a discussion of the Bill of Rights for Education with various stakeholders including artists.
He said it was difficult for the government to lure back qualified and experienced teachers to rural areas because of violence and poor housing that is why the quality of education in those communities has drastically deteriorated lately.
“We must look into the security concerns of teachers in rural communities and as a ministry we have realised that the greatest drop in education is in violent prone provinces,”Senator Coltart said.
He said there is need to democratise education in Zimbabwe to get it back to its excellent status of the 1980s.
This, he added, could only be achieved through the democratisation of the education content and the teaching process itself.
“There is no civic education in the current school curriculum and my ministry is working hard so that this is included. We need to teach democracy in schools,” said Coltart, a lawyer by training.
Raymond Majongwe, the president of the combative Progressive Teachers Union who attended the function said while the minister’s call to democratise the education system was a good idea, it would be difficult to implement as people in his ministry were working against him. “Ninety percent of the people under his ministry are against him.
He is the only education minister who has phoned me so we could discuss about teachers, not the likes of former Minister Aeneas Chigwedere,” Majongwe said.
Majongwe said democratisation and fair distribution of resources was critical for the education sector. He blamed influential politicians for allocating themselves grants and resources to build good schools in their areas at the expense of other provinces.
He said: “They donate computers in schools that have no use of them, yet there are schools already teaching computers who have no access to them. All they want is to appear in newspapers and television.”
Majongwe said the distribution of qualified teachers to the country’s various provinces was politically biased.
In rural areas, while trying to work with parents Majongwe noted that the District Administrators and even Chiefs were having a say in the running of schools.
He said: “Several Parent Teachers Associations have been formed to administer schools in rural areas and this has brought chaos to the administration of schools. The chairpersons of these committees are now always at the school, they want to buy the footballs, the books and so on, clearly jobs that should be done by school heads.”
He said during political party campaigns, local rural bullies chased away qualified teachers and at times ended up taking the teachers’ posts.
Majongwe welcomed the proposal by Minister Coltart to launch a Teachers Council as a way towards self regulation of the teaching profession.