Trials, Tribulations Of Tanzania's Education

with the mass failures in last year’s national Form Four exams – there would be enough students for Form Five enrolment.

We also wondered how, by extension, colleges and universities would find enough students for their needs if too few were completing Advanced Level studies.

Sadly, our worst fears have come true, with reports from a number of regions saying several secondary schools offering Advanced Level education have since closed shop or are little more than merely limping on after failing to enrol enough students.

The reports talk of private schools being a lot worse hit than “public” ones, suggesting that even some of those owned by religious institutions and for decades among the country’s best performers are no more insulated from the risk of becoming extinct than the rest of the pack.

Recent years have witnessed swelling numbers of parents and guardians take their children and grandchildren to private schools – at the expense of schools falling under the ‘public’ category. With the mission was accomplished, most of the best brains or promising talent the nation boasts are to be found in schools run by individuals or religious and other non-governmental institutions.

Generally speaking, private schools charge many times more in tuition and miscellaneous other fees than do government-run ones. This is hard to explain in that the government’s official position is that the difference is a lot bigger than it ought to be.

Rather ironically, few sponsors find the high fees off-putting, a major argument being that spending a fortune on quality education pays by far greater dividends than going for inferior education merely so as to save oneself a few thousand shillings for short-term “gains”.

Yet, there is no longer any guarantee that private schools (charging hefty fees) necessarily boast the best teachers and learning facilities and therefore offer superior education that makes them beat all other schools generally and, more specifically, in national examinations.

Efforts by the government to ensure that private schools toe charge the fees it has sanctioned have failed. This is just as have the banning of full-year pre-Form One tuition and the decades-old practice by some private schools of assembling the cream of Standard Seven and Form Four leavers from thousands of fee-paying applicants and taking them through Form One and Form Five tuition, whichever applies, months before such tuition begins in ‘public’ schools.

When some schools are well placed financially to identify and lure the nation’s best performing students before the rest of the schools can do anything about it, what kind of education should the Tanzania of tomorrow expect?

And this is only with regard to the quality of schools and students in general terms. We haven’t addressed specific issues such as job satisfaction for teachers, the quality and relevance of school and college curricula, teaching methods and exams, availability and relevance of textbooks and supplementary readers, etc., etc.

The writing is on the wall. There are many lessons we ought to learn from the debacle that last year’s national Form Four exam results were and from the student enrolment crisis colleges and A-Level schools are currently facing. We had better take heed.  source the Guardians

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