FARMER'S DIARY: We need education that meets community needs
Students pick vegetables for dinner and feed animals at Kamuzinda Farm and Vocational School in Masaka. Education should help students give back to their communities. PHOTOS BY MICHAEL J. SSALI
Some parents hold a misconceived belief that the best schools are those whose performance in national examinations makes newspaper headlines. Indeed, we have schools whose major objective is to do just that - prepare students for passing examinations in super grades, at whatever cost, even if it means cheating.
Other institutions train youths for only so-called white-collar jobs, resulting in thousands coming out of schools and colleges with high qualifications but unable to find work.
The child is born in the community and goes to school in that community. But upon leaving school, they fail to fit in the community because there is no occupation suited to the knowledge and skills they have achieved from school. So they go to the city where, hopefully, they will find a suitable occupation. Of what use then is such a school to the community?
In his book, Principles and Practice of Education, J.S Farrant, said, “Most schools in Africa tended to isolate themselves from the community with the result that schools and community proceeded along separate courses of development with rarely any point of contact apart from the pupils. The unfortunate consequence of this was that the children became increasingly alienated from their communities and ill-prepared for playing any useful roles in them.”
Education should be a means of helping children turn into resourceful, active, and good members of the community, ready to carry on with its economic and cultural development.
The school should be an instrument of development for the community and a centre for the education and training of its members. In our context, as a country, schools should turn out people focused on increasing incomes and improving livelihoods as well as household food and nutrition security in the communities where they exist.
At Kamuzinda Farm and Vocational School in Masaka district, I made a few interesting revelations. It is a school for orphans and vulnerable children on 40 acres. It would be unthinkable to ask such children to pay school fees - for who would pay anyway?
So how does the school of about 1,000 students thrive, feeding on a balanced diet of sweet potatoes, cassava, posho, beans, eggs, vegetables, meat, fruits, milk, and matooke, and some fish and at the same time, pay the salaries of its teachers and support staff, not to mention other expenses such as settling electricity bills?
It is not just a school, which regularly has the best results in the national exams in Kyannamukaaka sub-county. It is also a farm, which provides practical agricultural and technical skills. It has over 3,000 hens, nine Friesian cows, eight local cows, more than 100 pigs, scores of dairy goats, some rabbits, and fish ponds. It has a banana plantation, vegetable and maize fields, a pineapple field, and lots of fruit and fodder trees. If the students are not in class attending to academic subjects or in the field playing games, they are busy working in the gardens to produce their own food.
Every child then has a chance to learn how to keep poultry, pigs, goats, cows, and how to grow food and cash crops. They learn about soil conservation, the cure and prevention of animal diseases, food storage and nutrition, and keeping farm records apart from carpentry and tailoring.
The school has a coffee garden and a tree growing project to provide fruits, fodder for the animals, improve land stability, produce firewood, and for students to train in arboriculture. From an early age, children learn that one must work to live and that toiling is respectable.
“Since we get the children from the nearby community,” said Mr Apollo Saku, Principal of the school, “we take some of them back to their homes time and again to visit their parents or grandparents and to provide them with whatever small gifts that we can in form of items like beans, salt, soap, cooking oil and matches. We want them to maintain a link with their relatives because finally they will go back to live with them upon completion of their education here.
“The members of the community, most of whom are farmers, are also welcome to visit us always and to see what we do. Some actually pick a few farming ideas, which they use to improve their own farming activities.”
We need schools that give students practical lessons on how to give back to their communities.
