Education is now a closed door for Zimbabwean poor children

The ZANU PF government has hammered the final proverbial nail on the coffin to signal the end of education for children in Zimbabwe. The planned introduction of examination fees for Grade Sevens is an attempt to reduce the number of children who will go past this stage of education. The Minister of Primary and Secondary Education, Dr Lazarus Dokora also said the Cabinet resolved to increase Ordinary Level examinations from the current $13 to $15 per subject. It should be remembered that there is also school fees, levies and school uniforms that need to be paid. It is just too much for the parents who are already short of disposal incomes caused by the economic meltdown in Zimbabwe.
Readers will also recall that the same Education Minister Dr Dokora attempted to attach parents' properties in Harare claiming that they had failed to pay fees for their children. ZANU PF MP for Gokwe-Nembudziya, Justice Mayor Wadyajena, also said school children from primary to secondary school should be made to carry ZANU PF membership cards. It appears that ZANU PF has completely lost its mind by now prosecuting innocent children that have nothing to do with politics. The holy-grail of politics-free education seems to be violated through indoctrination and ZANU PF failure to prioritise significant issues of national importance.
Education is a human right and public good for social mobility, social justice and equality of opportunity. The government should take full responsibility for ensuring that every child in Zimbabwe has access to education regardless of their social and financial status. Education contributes, from an early age, to the socialisation, integration and empowerment of individuals. It is also a means of achieving personal fulfillment which can help to enhance the employability of young people in the future.
Equality of educational opportunity to all the children means that all children deserve to be giving an equal chance in life to fulfill their potential in intellectual, academic, professional, social and living skills. The introduction of Grade Seven examination fees is effectively legislating for discrimination against the poor. What it means now is that access to education by children would be based on their economic status and wellbeing. The children's access to education in Zimbabwe is now defined by their capacity to pay for this important human right service. Those without the money will obviously miss out. We are back in the era of educational colonialism in a supposedly free country.
The government has made a deeply regrettable decision to disfranchise many children from poor backgrounds across the country by deliberately creating a bottle neck at Grade Seven for children to progress to Secondary level. Many parents will prefer not to pay the examination fee, not because they are not willing but the economic realities on the ground are a deterrent.
The government makes a further squeeze by preventing children from poor family backgrounds proceeding to the advanced level by increasing ordinary level examination fees. This is a deliberate well-orchestrated measure to dampen children's aspirations; it is a political tool which has nothing to do with the educational needs of the country. The intended outcome is to make education a preserve for children from the elite social class, giving those children exclusive opportunities to become future social, political and economic leaders.
The plan is to push out the children from poor families deep into poverty, social stagnation and exclusion. The government does not say what will happen to the children at Grade Seven who fail to pay the examination fees. The possible scenarios are that the children will not enroll for Form One; the parents may simple withdraw their children from school, the parents could be arrested for failing to pay the examination fees or the bailiffs may attach their assets such as cows, goats, radios or televisions to recover the costs should government wish to allow the children who fail to pay the examination fees to sit for the exams.
The education of our children is being destroyed in front of our very own eyes, in a similar fashion that the government has destroyed the economy and the dignity of the people of Zimbabwe. This is an ill-conceived decision by the government with absolutely no benefits to the millions of school going children in Zimbabwe. The move will not even at its very best improve the quality of instructional learning, the supply of teachers, management and marking of exams. The introduction of fees at Grade Seven will not improve the chaos at ZIMSEC, examination markers will continue to be unpaid, leaking of examination tests will continue unabated, lost examination papers will not stop and missing examination results for students will still be a constant feature.
The introduction of examinations fees at Grade Seven does not serve a meaningful purpose as a means of evaluating the primary school education performance of individual children. Besides a one off test cannot be an absolute indicator of the overall performance of a child. Junior schools in some countries do not have national examinations for the twelve year olds. These children are still too young to comprehend the meaning of tests. Research indicates that children at this age get overwhelmed by anxiety due to the prospects of being tested and the fear of failure.
There has been a perennial poor performance of children at Grade Seven examinations for many years in rural and urban schools. The Government has not taken any meaningful action to address the situation and by introducing fees for Grade Seven examinations it has not found the magical answer as it hopes. The fact is that current Grade Seven examinations have made no real difference preventing grade seven children from proceeding to secondary schooling whether they pass or fail. Government must tell the nation what purpose the Grade Seven examinations serve if after writing those tests all the children (failed or passed) have an automatic progression secondary schooling.Paying examination fees at Grade Seven will generally raise expectation for good results which should certainly be the case in every school system. Where will that place the government if scores of children continue to fail the examinations with the introduction of Grade Seven examination fees?
The quality of education should not always be measured at the point of examination. The dynamics for a successful education system is based on a progressive education policy that is aimed at educating children for life and not for examinations. The Grade Seven examinations can be scrapped and replaced by course work marks or school based examinations or even provincial based examinations, a devolved approach proposed by ZAPU. The children can then progress to secondary education without this nonsense of the National Grade Seven examinations. If scrapped this will free the parents from the financial burden of paying examination fees that have very little or no contribution towards the ultimate goal of education for all children.
The Government seems to ignore the fact that education is not just limited to acquisition the skills of the labour market. Education is not only for the economic benefits for the individual, but also for a set of moral assumptions that are associated with life and work, such as self-respect, dignity, aspirations for social advancement and global integration. Education therefore serves multiple functions such as economic benefits, social inclusion, social cohesion and a non-divided society. The introduction of examination fees at Grade Seven will result in a large number of school drop outs at an early stage of their educational journey. It will marginalize them and endanger their opportunities of becoming productive future citizens and thereby creating severe social inequalities in the country.Children have better educational opportunities if they are not constrained from their educational journey. These educational opportunities depend on the enabling possibilities generated by the rules and practices of the government. The government of ZANU PF is simply and squarely working against the children's aspirations. The government is by law supposed to provide sustainable education for the country but it is engaged in destroying the children's chances of becoming better educated members of our society.
The fair deal is for government to create a country where there are new opportunities for every child; opportunities for education and training. Instead of the government focusing on one small element of education measurement such as the examinations, the government should be focusing on broader issues of education delivery such as appropriate educational policies; sound educational governance; proper educational instruction; adequate supply of quality teachers; good educational infrastructure, media and learning resources. Examinations should never be a priority; they are simply a measurement of how well individual children are performing and how effective the government educational process is.
When the ZANU PF government got into power in 1980, out of excitement they announced the policy of education for all, free education at primary and secondary schools  without any planning about how the conceived idea was going to be financed sustained, managed and how school graduates were going to be absorbed in to the employment industry.  The positive thing was however that an overwhelming number of children went to school regardless of the benefits, however, many left secondary school unable to read and write and without jobs. The school system was therefore a place of containment. The policy of mass education is now in total reversal and high levels of illiteracy are beginning to image. More and more children cannot afford to go to school due to school fees and now the introduction of examination fees is a financial challenge that many parents can no longer afford.
The government has a responsibility for creating a ladder of opportunity; a ladder of opportunity from the primary school to the workplace and society. A good government does not become the obstacle for educational mobility of children destroying the survival of the next generation of Zimbabweans. By so doing the government is preventing many children from using their own personal resources and initiatives to make a case for their future development.