This article was published in The Citizen Newspaper – Tanzania on September 30, 2025.
Shimbo Pastory
In education as a whole, strategy plays an unimaginably significant role. This entails strategy not only in teaching, but in the entire process of adjudging the needs, discerning educational topics and materials, in the delivery process, and in the receiving process on the side of learners.
The educational cycle feeds itself, or we can say pushes itself, and builds on the work done in the preceding cycle. The educational needs are the societal problems, the gaps needing solution, yet to attain to those, a certain amount of groundwork is needed as foundation; hence we have curricula to guide the whole formal process.
Delivery of knowledge to the learners is not a final stage of the process, nor is the grades the learners get. After learning there is assessment, constructive feedback, reflection, application (in context), adaptation or improvement of the content and the process, and again the process goes back to preparation. Educationists call this instructional or teaching and learning cycle.
Despising appropriate strategy in any of these sections affects irreparably the productivity of the whole chain, regardless of the quality of work or output in the unaffected sections of the chain. As such we can say it education is by its very form, content and function, ‘a chain reaction’, contingent to the indispensable interdependence of all players in the process.
For most learners being educated at school is remembering or memorizing. Why? Because that is how the system orients them to look at education. Most learners consider schooling like a reward system, and themselves as heroes depending on how high up the reward ladder they are ranked.
One is considered not smart, creative, or intelligent unless the grading system says so! As such all creativity and innovativeness has to be shrunk to fit into the demands of the spoon- feeding system; which unfortunately, kills many dreams and talents.
Our question of concern in this write-up is whether learners are taught how to learn. We cannot just presume that people, especially our young people, know how to learn academically. Learning goes beyond reading and understanding what books say.
Learning is a process of integration, like putting together puzzle pieces until the whole puzzle makes sense. Learning has to stir one’s curious core and stimulate the interest to grasp more and more. But this is only possible if our learners are helped to first discover their areas of interest, not their areas of performance.
A child can perform better in a subject they have no interest about just because they love the teacher, etc. but that interest evaporates if the teacher is changed. The best and more outstanding ground for one’s interest is what they naturally feel curious about. There is no harm to expose them to many options before making them express freely what they like to engage in mostly in academics.
A learning process that does not involve the learner’s consent and feelings has higher chances of achieving little or nothing by either producing uninterested experts who only do their jobs to earn a living, as what they do was never their passion.
Teaching children how to learn can help a lot in knowing what they are interested about and how they like or are comfortable to be taught in order to make them the best versions of themselves. If the goal of education is to make people the best versions of themselves, then these considerations are of paramount importance.
Equally, it is important to consider that times have changed, even though the things to be learnt, are more or less the same, especially because facts and principles are not stories, so they do not lose relevance.
But what to consider here is that globally the education system is handling mostly young people who have a very different exposure, given the facility of technology, demographics, labour market demands and dynamics, and the fast-pacing globalization, among others.
These factors inevitably affect the way young learners look at education and its entire process, and even the questions they ask are different questions as compared to questions asked by learners of the same levels 30 years ago.
The sooner we come to terms with this fact, and considerate of their worldview, the better chances we have of making education functionally relevant to them.
It is paramount to make the system of education a means of transformation, not just a pipeline where people pass through with changed credentials yet untransformed.
With Tanzania having about 77% per cent of its population aging below the age of 35, that is about 47.5 million persons, according to 22 Census report, education is the best legacy for them and the coming generations, especially considering that this biggest portion of nationals is marginally represented in the national policy makers’ roundtables.
This group is by far a ‘surviving’ group with most of them having life not figured out due to unemployment and other systemic shortcomings beyond their control. It is a testimony of poor planning given that statistics obtained every year could have been used for comprehensive predictions and plans in anticipation of the problems we have now.
If this was done we would have been much further than we are as we have a surplus of workforce in the young people of this nation. To go far with the quality of our education we need well-articulated strategies which prioritize the role of learners, and not just instructors.
