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| President Robert Mugabe |
When education prepares students for a livelihood but not for life, its benefits can seldom be sustained.
It is a glaring contradiction when space for acquiring self-sustaining skills equally becomes space for acquiring self-destroying behaviour.
Tragically, this seems to be the case with education in Zimbabwe, at least to a minor but progressive extent.
The media is awash with reports of teenage delinquency involving drug abuse, violence, sexual aggression and prostitution.
The long-run forecast is bleak and guardians have cause for apprehension if habit-forming substances, promiscuity and nude parties continue to grow a stake in schools.
President Robert Mugabe took on the problem in his Independence Children’s Party address at the City Sports Centre on Sunday.
The president lamented that even as all parents desire to see their children excel academically, some are failing to make the grade because their lives now revolve around illicit pleasure, particularly drugs.
“Sadly some of the youths today have not lived up to our expectations. They have instead become victims of hedonism; the perception that pleasure is the highest good and the proper aim of human life,” President Mugabe lamented.
“Day in, day out we hear stories of children being involved in the so-called wild parties where drugs are peddled and consumed with ease and abundance,” he said.
The stories are as tragic as they get, given that school uniforms do not make students immune to the devastating effects of drugs and sexually transmitted infections and youths are badly placed to handle the consequences of their rash decisions.
What is now apparent, and appallingly so, is that schools and parents no longer have a monopoly in raising children. Internet, television and peer influence are competing for the greater stake.
The inordinate promotion of sexual expressions in music, movies, magazines, social media and peer influence, more debilitating than is generally acknowledged, are staple fare in these morally adrift times.
During the exam period last year, at least 29 Zengeza 4 High School students, all of them in writing classes, sent caution and conscience to the devil and took moral standards to a new low.
The students – 22 girls and seven boys – attended a nude party where drugs and group sex were top of the agenda.
Few months earlier, 15 students and one adult man had been convicted of criminal nuisance after pleading guilty to attending a nude party in Westgate.
President Mugabe urged a joint effort involving schools, families and other fronts for positive behaviour to protect youths from derailing to depravity.
However, he maintained that responsible behaviour is a decision youths themselves must ultimately take.
“As young people, you need to take stock of your conduct. Make your future a conscious project of self-actualisation, through what you are currently doing. Never forget that you might end up being the company you keep so keep good company,” he said.
Ironically, student deviance concurs with an increasingly permissive and westernised climate in schools.
Traditional measures such as corporal punishment are now classified as atrocities from the Dark Ages, not without a cost as discipline continues to be on the wane.
It also concurs with a new morality, complete with new lows such as advocacy for contraception in schools from the some of the highest political platforms in the land.
The inadvertent message from these NGO-themed moral upheavals is that schools are supposed to have given up on promoting moral behaviour among students.
Schools are now supposed to equivocate on such important issues, officially prohibiting sexual activity in schools and unofficially condoning it.
Such mixed messages hardly help students who are largely dependent on influences around them for life-shaping decisions.
Holistic education takes places when schools acknowledge that behaviour is the syllabus that cannot be scrapped and equip students with the moral software obligatory for responsible citizens.
Increasingly, it seems as if a middle wall is rising between the school’s mandate to produce good academic results and its traditional responsibility as a moral steward.
Some of the problems assailing Zimbabwe on a national scale are attributable to a dysfunction at the educational level.
Schools must not only produce excellent academic performers but ethically rounded and civic-minded youths who can serve their communities and industries with integrity.
President Mugabe, responding to a question on whether Zimbabwe’s moral consciousness was failing, observed during a 2006 ZBC newscast: “That is a question you and I should answer, our families and the parents should answer that question; managers in business should answer that question.
“Yes I think there is a lot of rotten fibre… all is not lost of course, but the frequency, the incidence of corruption must worry everybody, everybody wherever we are… it’s happening quite frequently, theft in business, theft and corruption in Government… Let’s all work to revive our morality now,” he said.
While this is a multi-sectoral responsibility, the task may be much easier for everyone if schools guarantee moral consciousness.
It is a task that is now much more demanding that it used to be but all the more imperative lest the lower nature predominate the educational faculty in today’s sex-captive society.
TheBehaviourReport.com conducted a behaviour survey among youths aged between 13 and 22 in Masvingo, Harare, Bulawayo, Gweru, Mutare, Marondera, Kwekwe, Kadoma and Chinhoyi.
The survey conducted between 2003 and 2009 and published in 2013 lifts the rug off deviant sexual patterns among the youths.
“Put bluntly, one in every two teens is at least sexually active. That is taking rebellion to levels unknown to our nation and people,” BehaviourReport.com founder Oscar Habeenzu reported back.
The survey estimates a 12 percent rate of abortion among teenagers, all that behind the curtains and beyond conscience.
It also revealed minority, all the same worrying, tendencies such as drug abuse, even active homosexuality, among teenagers.
It is more difficult than ever to monitor and influence student behaviour because youths can hold together a picture-perfect personality to keep family, school and church confident of them while indulging in unthinkable backstage perversity.
Deviant behaviour fermenting in high school suddenly flares out of inhibition at college and university often with heavy costs, health-wise.
Last month, National Aids Council Midlands provincial coordinator Mr Manhewu Shumba blamed the growing prevalence of HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the province on sexual relations between old people and Midlands State University (MSU) students.
According to NAC, Gweru recorded 6 727 sexually transmitted infections cases this year, up from 5 814 in 2013.
The Great Zimbabwe University has also been implicated as an HIV and STI driver in Masvingo owing, in part, to sexual relations between students and artisanal miners in the province.
“Pretending that the times have not changed does not help influence their behaviour for productivity, rather it worsens the situation,” Habeenzu observes.
“The teen of today has split images; having the ability to be holy at church, decent at home, a well-mannered genius at school, yet a hooligan with unscrupulous tendencies deemed uncivil,” he adds.
This essentially means that society’s moral engines, schools eminently included, must update their methods of engaging with the youths.
One way to do this is to do away with denialism, establish the extent to which these things are happening from reliable research, and take realistic measures to right them.
Parents are confident that their children are observing the ancient landmarks even as they sing along to sexually explicit songs at their parties, an abuse which has also tagged infants along.
All stakeholders need to acknowledge that they have a diminishing stake in how youths behave and catch up with the new trends in order to counter them.
Otherwise, they will be schooled by hardcore entertainment right under their parents’ and their schools’ roofs and throw away what gains education has to offer.
