In addition to the seven areas identified by the “experts”, the Trojan horse (Eurocentric Education System) that has impeded development in Africa is overlooked. This may be the reason that the World Bank is choosing to develop a higher education plan without inputs from the best Ethiopian experts within and outside of the Country.
It is not only higher education that is needed; Ethiopia’s existing intellectual, spiritual, technical, biological, philosophical, agricultural knowledge etc will have to be enhanced through Ethiocenterc education system. Ethiopia has not been able to do this for nearly forty years and there is a plan to perpetuate the same in the near and foreseable future.
If the prevailing education plan is altered, brain drain could be minimized, thereby affecting the present benefactors of the existing education system. I have never understood the rationale for investing nearly 20 percent of the GDP on education system that trains selected few in the so-called “Modern Education” emphasizing to a large extent western philosophy of education developed for the culture, technology unrelated to Ethiopia’s culture, level of development, value systems and aspiration of the majority of the population.
We have graduated indigenous engineers, medical professionals, educators, biologists, architects, lawyers, agriculturists etc. using western textbooks, languages, and value systems and philosophy. The country’s economy is 85 percent agrarian and only 15 percent of the population is engaged in manufacturing industry and the civil service sector of the Country’s economy.
Ten out of the fifteen percent of the population not leading agrarian life is a civil servant while the remaining five percent is engaged in a very small manufacturing industry like: small metals factory, cement factories, textile, leather, soap manufacturing, breweries, and oil seed processing plants. So where would our civil, mechanical, chemical, aerospace engineers fit in the economy such as ours?
It does not require higher mathematical solution to figure out as to where all these graduates educated in western culture and technical knowledge using one of the western languages end up; they leave the country for more fertile grounds in Europe, Australia and North America because of the push-and-pull factors enunciated by economists.
In a country where majority of the population is suffering from infectious diseases, malnutrition, lack of maternal care, suffering from external and internal parasites, what will the role of Ethiopia’s oncologists, surgeons, and neurologists be in the Country? The same could be said about our educators, agriculturists, social scientists, lawyers, technologists etc.
No wonder then that Africa is losing nearly twenty-three thousand of its highly qualified professionals yearly to Western countries. Ethiopia is contributing a bigger chunk to number of professionals immigrating to western nations.
We are now implementing the so called “modern education” with a heavy Eurocentric education philosophy, which has so far generated a bumper crop of experts to run the technical, engineering and biotechnological facilities outside of Africa.
It is ironic that a very poor country like Ethiopia is feeding mills of change in the most advanced societies of Europe and North America! I hope and pray that Ethiopia will start producing experts that will not be alien to their own culture and will be the engines of change in country.
The author, Dr.
Seyoum Gelaye, is
Dean for the College of Graduate Studies and Extended Education,
Fort Valley State University. He can be reached by email: [email protected]
