“EDUCATION NEEDS FACELIFT; TOP POSITIONS SHOULD BE OCCUPIED BY PhD HOLDERS”
ANALYSIS BY JEFF SAMPA
CHANGE is the only aspect of life meant to be constant.
It’s a project, initiative or solution that is introduced in an organisation to improve the way work gets done, solve problems, or take advantage.
Change can also be said to be a systematic approach to dealing with the transition or transformation of an organisation’s goals, processes or technologies.
In an organisation such as the education sector, change should be coupled with proper placement. This makes employees happy and reduces absenteeism and labour turnover.
Proper placement increases morale and efficiency of the employees and builds a good relationship with the employer. It enables the employer to assign a specific rank and responsibility to an individual based on their qualifications.
The reason why the employer must value formal qualifications is that they provide an objective, externally validated form of assessment of knowledge and skills.
The employer must develop a trend of benchmarking. This is a practice of comparing and measuring the performance of an organisation’s products, services or process against those of others.
The education sector has seen many gallant young men and women exit the ministry after attaining higher qualifications due to lack of recognition and misplacement by the employer.
Many have become mere hustlers who move from one university to another in the name of part-time lecturing.
They are treated as misfits, threats and a source of intimidation by the lowly qualified supervisors in the sector on attainment of such higher qualifications.
This is so because as a country we have chosen to be static when it comes to pre-requisites for our managerial positions creating space for any Jim and Jack to rise to any position through nepotism, tribalism, political cheer-leading and corruption.
Why should influential positions like DEBS, PEO, SESO and directors have a bachelor’s Degree as their pre-requisite?
The Ministry of Education, being a provider of education services and the mother of all careers and ministries, should set standards that can be emulated by other sectors.
The world currently faces dynamic challenges that require forcused thinking to be able to survive.
It’s, therefore, imperative that we raise the bar higher in the Ministry of Education so that we are able to utilise the dormant knowledge kept buried or neglected.
There is no way someone with a degree can supervise someone with a master’s degree or better. This ought to be thought through carefully. People advance in their studies in order to update themselves with the current knowledge and skills.
So you can’t have a PhD holder being supervised by someone less qualified.
That is why in universities someone with a bachelor’s degree lectures diploma students, master’s degree holder lectures bachelor’s degree students and a PhD holder lectures all. This shows respect for the knowledge levels and there is harmony in their operations.
My request to the New Dawn government through cabinet office is that, going forward, positions such as DEBS, SESO, PEO and director should be occupied by PhD holders.
These positions must be free from political influence, nepotism, tribalism and corruption. The move will attract intellectuals we lost to hustling because they couldn’t fit in a diluted system where the bottom took the upper positions.
Such a project will also help our system do very well when it comes to policy formulation, implementation, interpretation, revision of the curriculum, and there will be a well-researched feedback system where reports from these ranks to the permanent secretary will be evidence-based, not aimed at covering failure.
It’s high time we started managing our think tanks with great caution as a ministry.
The author is an educationalist
Credit: Zambia daily Mail