Official media recently reported that the number of new graduates from higher education institutions in Ethiopia has reached more than 70,000 students. This is a big achievement by any account. If one thing is certain, this figure shows that the momentum set for the quantitative growth in student graduation from higher institutions of learning is still continuing unabated.
In fact, student enrolment in Ethiopia continues to grow at all levels, not least in the tertiary sector. According to available data, “official figures indicate that there are currently more than 450,000 students enrolled in higher education, while 25 million pupils are enrolled in primary and secondary education.”
This process may be seen as a clear indication that the country is set to teach its children no matter what while this can also be seen as a big challenge for the job market that is hard-hit at this particular time when a kind of economic recession is continuing to create havoc in all sectors of the economy. The other drawback is the challenge of providing hat are joining higher quality education to the millions of children and young people who are going to school every year.
The issue of educational quality in Ethiopia has claimed the headlines, roughly since the last two or three decades when a massive educational development program was launched by the EPRDF government in order to make education available to people who had thus far been denied of this vital opportunity.
Accordingly thousands of primary and secondary schools were built and student enrolment saw an unprecedented boom while the number of colleges and universities saw a parallel growth allowing hundreds of thousands of youngster access college level education. Before 1991, there were only half a dozen institutions of higher learning while a couple of decades after dozens of them appeared in almost all the regional states in the country.
However, the race for quantitative growth in the number of schools, colleges and student enrolment had a serious drawback that appeared only later in the process of this national frenzy to build more schools and enroll more students at all levels of the educational hierarchy. To begin with, here was an obvious mismatch between the above indicated educational expansion and the readiness to provide better quality education at all levels.
The number of teachers required to accommodate all those students was simply insufficient as teacher training institutes were not well developed in the pre-1991 period. As foreign scholars and educators, mainly from the West and from India, were largely discouraged from coming to the country to share their expertise, the local manpower engaged in educational development could not catch up with the huge tasks that such a massive undertaking required. Last but not least, the curricula that were in effect under the previous regime were not revised and implemented in such a way that they could respond to the economic development of the country. And when certain reforms were introduced in this particular area, it was too little too late.
Putting more emphasis on technical education in the Ethiopian context was reasonable but the pace and time of introduction of such a policy came relatively late and created more heat than light as far as its implementation was concerned. The last straw that broke the camel’s back was the absence of a nationwide discussion or debate regarding what kind of education the nation needed or how the new reforms could be implemented. The net product of all these contradictions was that quantitative growth continued at breakneck speed while qualitative growth lagged behind although its devastating consequences appeared relatively late in the process.
Millions of students went to schools, hundreds of thousands of them graduated every year from colleges and universities but few could meet the educational standards needed to meet the challenges of their professional life. Such a serious shortcoming was more obviously felt after the students left colleges and tried to apply their learning to the realities of daily professional life. The students were simply ill-prepared to pass the test of real life even though many of them passed school leaving and college’s exams with flying colors.
In brief, educational development in Ethiopia could not live up to the challenges of national development and the aspiration of the millions of people who were expecting a better life for them and for their children. The ill-conceived educational development program was riddled with crises and needed a serious rethinking and/or fixing. To make matters even worse, corruption had permeated all aspects of life in the country including the educational establishment particularly at higher levels of the educational hierarchy. The construction of new universities at the same time led to the waste of massive financial and material resources that went to waste as they were allegedly mismanaged.
The new educational reform initiative that was launched under the new government had to juggle with two main issues at the same time. On the one hand, it had to work for a viable educational reform program while trying to maintain the tempo of expansion started by the previous government although the two issues seemed contradictory and mutually exclusive.
That was the main challenge that made the reforms painful to implement and painful to sustain as there was not enough time and human and material resources to address both of them at the same time. According to one study on the problems faced by educational reform in Ethiopia, “The number of schools and teachers increased tremendously but the lack of standardization, crowded classrooms, high turnover and poor commitment by teachers towards their profession, poor school leadership, etc. are the major bottlenecks.”
Education in Ethiopia has always been perceived as the key to success for individuals and the motor of economic development for the country. Education and economic development are inseparable in the sense that one is the basis or trigger to the other. Education and political progress are also closely linked in the sense that democracy is inconceivable without an informed people making decisions that are vital to their interests. Democracy is about making informed decisions and cultivating critical thinking. This is of course impossible without the availability of an informed civil society.
That is basically why the history of modern Ethiopia is always about building modern education and producing an informed, critical and progressive civil society. Among the general objectives of the educational policy, in Ethiopia, we can perhaps indicate one of them which are to “bring up citizens who respect human rights, stand for the well-being of people, as well as for equality, justice and peace, endowed with democratic culture and discipline.”
Modern education in Ethiopia has made tremendous progress in so far as the number educated people are concerned. At the turn of the 20th century, the number of modern schools and student enrolment in these schools was negligible. The first initiatives in the direction of modernizing Ethiopia’s education in the sense of building schools, curricula and policies that could help the country make the painful transition from the traditional church education to the so-called modern or Western-style education dates back to a little more than 50 years. The first half of the 20th century was spent domestic conflicts and external invasions that have prevented the government to launch a consistent or sustainable process of educational modernization.
To be more exact, “Modern education in Ethiopia was commenced after the reign of emperor Menelik II, who then opened the first school, Menelik II school in 1908. Before that, he issued a proclamation in 1906 that reads: in other countries, not only do the younger citizens learn, they make new things even more.” However, this process was not at all smooth and always welcomed. According to available data, despite the fact that the introduction of modern education was a progressive step in the right direction, “it met with opposition from the clergy and priests from the Orthodox church, primarily the Coptic orthodox. However, by 1913 provincial schools were expanded to Harar, Dessie and Ankober.”
The process of educational development in Ethiopia has never been a smooth process for that matter because like any aspect of national life, public education too was targeted for change or anew beginning after a change of government. According to the some sources, for instance, “During the Derg regime, a new education policy was enacted embracing socialist ideology and charted by the National Democratic Revolution (NDR) in 1976….The literacy rate was increased by this era compared to Haile Sellassie regime, and enrollment increased from 224, 934 in 1959-1960 to 1,042, 900 in 1974-1975 about 15% per annum.” The Derg was subsequently credited for making a dent into the level of adult literacy which remained stagnant if not declined in the previous decades.
It seems that the educational system in Ethiopia over the last few decades has witnessed reforms that were unsuccessful, like the 1974 ill-ill fated Educational Sector Reform, reforms that have neither failed nor succeeded and reforms that are currently underway. According to scholars, “Educational reform is the process of constantly renegotiating and restructuring the educational standards to reflect the ever-evolving contemporary ideals of social, economic and political culture. Reforms can be based on bringing education into alignment with a society’s core values.”
An educational system that is not subjected to constant reevaluation and reform is a system that can hardly live up to the above objectives. The Ethiopian education system is no exception. It can renew itself, correct its weaknesses and evaluate itself critically only if it looks at itself critically and make the necessary adjustments in time and with commitment. A number of petty and big reforms initiative have failed to deliver the goods in the past and Ethiopia’s educational system is still at another crossroads.
Whether it would live up to public expectations or fail to deliver is a matter for scholars and educators to discuss, debate and contribute to its success. As we celebrate the graduation of hundreds of thousands of students at all levels of the educational system, we are also deeply concerned how it would be possible to manage all this newly minted manpower or whether the new graduates will prove their mettle this time around once they join the job market.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD WEDNESDAY 26 JULY 2023
