Abridged school curriculum is unacceptable

Welcome to this simple question and answer exercise. And to get started, I am asking: What would be the best way to leverage teaching and lesson uptake for the “returnee” semi-candidate classes that are scheduled to resume schooling in March after an extended wait? 

Is it by just abridging the curriculum content or through adoption of smarter teaching-learning strategies? These question is a derivative of the article that appeared in the Daily Monitor of February 17 titled: “Teachers, ministry officials split on curriculum”. The bone of contention between the teachers and their bosses at the Ministry of Education and Sports is over the strategy to be adopted in a bid to “make up” for the time lost during the prolonged Covid-19 school closure.

Whereas the ministry officials are rooting for a compressed or an abridged curriculum for Terms I and II ostensibly to “fas-track teaching and learning for semi-candidate classes,” their frontline officers (the teachers) have seriously doubted the viability of such a “truncated” learning package. 
I am tempted to agree with the teachers. Why? Because, while the stance taken by the Ministry of Education may prove to be administratively expedient, it is both logistically and technically untenable for a number of reasons:

First, the sheer existence of some discord between the teachers and the Education ministry bureaucrats, is in itself indicative of the fact that the ministry officials had unilaterally decided on an abridged curriculum without prior and adequate consultation with the teaching workforce. That is inexcusable! The ministry officials (more than anyone else) should be knowing that teachers’ buy-in is a precondition for the successful and expedited implementation of any school curriculum. Top-down decision-making should now be a thing of the past. 
    
Second, I do not know whether the ministry officials bothered to even subjectively assess the opportunity costs and other ramifications of an abridged school curriculum. When you condense a curriculum that has to be covered within a contracted time frame, you necessarily get pressured into shedding off some topics; avoiding in-depth coverage of even the fewer chosen topics; employing teacher-dominated instructional strategies; and reliance on easy-to-mark examination questions that majorly ask the student to merely recall unprocessed facts. By inference, therefore, and from a purely educational perspective, abridging a school curriculum in effect forces teachers to cognitively “under-dose” the learners. 

Isn’t it absurd that while our overarching education policy emphasises the imperative of an all-round inclusive quality education, the very ministry that authored that flagship policy is at the same time the one championing the proposal for a “defiled” curriculum? 
Mr Alex Kakooza, the Education ministry Permanent Secretary, seemingly attempted to justify the ministry’s position by invoking the dictum that abnormal situations call for abnormal solutions! 

Would it, therefore, in his view, be professionally and morally prudent for a medical doctor to deliberately under-dose malaria patients simply because there are widespread drug stockouts? I want to remind the Ministry of Education officials that poor education is worse than no education at all.
Rather than focus on abridging school curricula, we ought to be exploring possibilities of embracing edutech-assisted pedagogies to fast-track teaching and learning. It costs money okay. But, good education is never cheap!  

Mr Henry Edison Okurut Kedi is a social commentator. [email protected]