Solving the African problem. (Part 1)When are we old enough to start making a living!.

In Africa it has become common sense that all “children” must attend school and should learn only in school. For this purpose I shall define “school” as the age-specific, teacher-related process requiring full-time attendance at an obligatory curriculum.

Age.

School groups people according to age. This grouping rests on three unquestioned premises.

Children belong in school. Children learn in school. Children can be taught only in school.

I think these unexamined premises deserve serious questioning. We have grown accustomed to children. We have decided that they should go to school, do as they are told, and have neither income nor families of their own. We expect them to know their place and behave like children. We remember, whether nostalgically or bitterly, a time when we were children,too.

We are expected to tolerate the childish behavior of children. Man-kind, for us, is a species both afflicted and blessed with the task of caring for children. We forget, however, that our present concept of “childhood” developed only recently in Western Europe and more recently still in the Americas.

Childhood as distinct from infancy, adolescence, or youth was unknown here in Uganda or Africa.Until the last century, “children” of middle-class parents were made at home with the help of preceptors and private schools (Ebisakaate,Uncles and Aunties e.t.c). Only with the advent of colonialists did the mass production of “childhood” become feasible and come within the reach of the masses.

The school system is a colonial phenomenon, as is the childhood it produces.I think If you are well nourished, you should be useful by eleven, and otherwise by twelve.

Recently, I was talking to an Askari here at UCU,Deus,about his eleven-year-old son who works in a barbershop.

Deus, surprised, answered with a guileless smile: “John, I guess you’re right.” Realizing that until my remark the father had thought of Deus primarily as his “son,” I felt guilty for having drawn the curtain of childhood between two sensible persons. Of course if I were to tell a kampala slum-dweller that his working son is still a “child,” he would show no surprise. He knows quite well that his eleven-year-old son should be allowed childhood, and resents the fact that he is not. Deus’s son has yet to be afflicted with the yearning for childhood; the Kampalan son feels.

Growing up through childhood means being condemned to a process of in-human conflict between self-awareness and the role imposed by a society going through its own school age. If there were no age-specific and obligatory learning institution, “childhood” would go out of production. The youths would be liberated from its destructiveness,and poor nations would cease attempting to rival the childishness of the rich. If society were to outgrow its age of childhood, it would have to become livable for the young. The present disjunction between an adult society which pretends to be humane and a school environment which mocks reality could no longer be maintained.

If Africa could draw back in the past and learn that about work in Traditional Africa,Africans can be more productive.