The black man is capable of managing it own affairs, a popular quote made by the greatest African leader ever Osagyefo Doctor Kwame Nkrumah as part of his Independence Declaration on the eve of 6th March, 1957 at the Old Polo Grounds, keeps ringing in the ears of many when it comes to bringing up African generational thinkers. This article entitled ‘The Evolution of African Genera- tional thinkers, focuses on Africa’s educational system, the challenges and possible solutions to making this dream a reality.
For starters, several factors contribute to the nurturing of individuals to becoming generational thinkers. Education is some part of the world is helping to shaping the minds of young people to be problem solvers while other part of the world is busy memorizing notes given in class.
The origins of African education may be found in Egypt and in Northern Koera. One of the first convenient mediums for retaining accurate information, papyrus, was used to develop systems for learning and developing new ideas. In fact, one of the first forms of higher education inAfrica were the School of Holy Scriptures built in Ethiopia and Al-Azhar which was in Egypt. These schools became cultural and academic centers as many people traveled from all over the globe for knowledge and instruction. Well before contact with external cultures, Africans had developed pools of understanding and educational tools.
Although the quality of education and the quantity of well-equipped schools and teachers has steadily increased since the onset of the colonial period, there are still evident numerous inequalities in the existing educational systems based on region, economic status, and gender. Education in many precolonial African states was in the form of apprenticeship, which was a form of informal education, where children and
or younger members of each household mostly learned from older members of their household, and community. In most cases, each household member learned more than one skill in addition to learning the values, socialization, and norms of the community/tribe/household. Some of the common skills that people in precolonial Africa had to learn include, dancing, farming, wine making, cooking (mostly the females), and in some cases selected people learn how to practice herbal medicine, how to carve stools, how to carve masks and other furniture.
Story telling also played a significant role in education during pre-colonial Africa. Parents, other older members of households and Griots used oral story telling to teach children about the history, norms and values of their state, household and community. Children usually gathered around the storyteller who then nar- rates stories, usually, using personifications to tell stories that encourage conformity, obedi- ence and values such as endurance, integrity, and other ethical values that are important for co-operations in the community.
The harmonized learning outcomes, an effort by Patrinos and Angrist (2018) to combine data from different tests across regions, finds that learning outcomes for countries in Sub-Saharan Africa concentrated in the bottom half of the learning spectrum; al- though they are not substantively lower than what would be expected for Africa’s income levels. A combined measure of schooling quantity and quality—the learning-adjusted years of schooling shows more African countries perform- ing below what their income level would predict. Further, the quality of learning outcomes does not appear to be rising in recent years. Le Nestour et al. (2020) document steady increases in adult literacy rates between 1940 and 2000, mostly linked to increases in enrolment.
Language Barrier or Mother Tongue
Mother tongue instruction usually refers to teaching student’s basic skills in a language that they already know when they arrive at school. In many African countries, the historical norm has been to teach children in a colonial language (e.g., English, French or Portuguese), even though most children arrive
at school with little or no ability in that language.
Teaching children to read in a language they speak at home increased the rate at which children learn to read. While impacts on initial reading ability in the mother tongue are promising, the objective of many parents is for their children to be literate in the colonial language, which may explain some of the resistance that parents have posed to mother tongue instruction reforms, as in Kenya. Several recent studies suggest that mother tongue instruction has positive impacts on children’s ability to subsequently learn a second language. How- ever, the effect is not as strong: students taught in mother tongue do not perform any better in English and perform worse in mathematics compared with students taught in a non-mother tongue. Meanwhile there is some evidence of impact beyond literacy. In Ethiopia, where mother tongue instruction reforms took place in 1994, researchers have identified long-term impacts on educational attainment and civic engagement.
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