Prof. Makala Lilemba
All Namibian schools have clocked six months, and in some quarters where all stakeholders in education are pulling together to achieve targeted goals, much has been achieved in all spheres.
Some teachers and learners are currently readying themselves for the examinations, as the pride of Namibian education is the number of points a learner collects in this assessment.
The education system rarely rewards practicality and innovation. It is the same old story, emanating from the Bantu education system in which education for black children was interiorised and theorised for cheap labour and total dependency on whites.
Some societies identify cabbage when encountered on the shelves in the supermarket but not its leaves in a garden. That is how an African child has been brainwashed.
With the advent of independence that the education world order has changed, if one considers the influx of different types of nations to Namibia and bringing along all types of philosophies. This should bring us to the realisation that society is changing very fast and these changes affect school administration.
Therefore, an increased value is placed on education and more people from all walks of life desire more education, resulting in administrative problems in schools. Ill discipline among learners and teaching staff is a common occurrence, as they are bombarded by shallow culture modes, such as drugs, free love, Satanism and heavy pop music as well as the current situation of homosexuality.
The youth accept these ills as true values without putting them to the test or thinking for themselves. In a similar vein, modern technology in the field of communications, such as television, cell phones, newspapers, magazines, Internet and many other technical gadgets, confront learners with such style, colour, graphics and three-dimensional figures that the unfortunate teacher, while knowing all the content and didactic problems, appears to be a boring, uninteresting and amateur (Ballantine, 1997).
Despite the constitutional provision of Article 8 (2) (b), which prohibits torture or anyone subjected to cruelty or degrading punishment, there are cases in which learners assault teachers and vice versa.
This situation does not augur well for any effective learning and teaching. The quality of education as a result plummets and learners fail to make it to the university or colleges of higher learning year in and year out.
In such situations, the bottom line is that standards in education tend to decline as learning becomes irrelevant.
But some of these problems could be minimised and solved if schools were effectively managed by having school principals equipped with the appropriate skills, knowledge and attitudes to carry out their leadership roles.
A school principal should know that every school established in a society might be quite different from another community. We are living in an era in which the school has been revolutionised and poses many challenges – leadership included.
It is, therefore, important that principals should catch up with the current developments in the school system. Hence, the principals should be able to understand which leadership style to implement in a particular situation.
As Musaazi (1982) cautions, it is important to make certain observations when leading any school, as the concept of leadership is elusive because it depends not only on the position, behaviour and personal characteristics of the leader but also on the circumstances in which one finds himself, meaning leadership may change according to the situation in which one finds himself.
In very difficult and tempting situations, the leadership qualities of one person may not stand the test of time. In a specific situation, leaders do have traits that set them apart from other followers and might vary from situation to situation.
This means that a person or principal can be a very good leader, but if taken to a place where staff members do not cooperate with him, his qualities as a leader may not be relevant in this place. In some cases, this might require servant leadership as coined by Robert Greenleaf (1977), which emphasises that leaders be attentive to the concerns of their followers and nurture them by putting their followers first, empowering them, helping them develop their full personal capacities and place the good of followers over their self-interests and emphasise follower development.
In other words, one cannot become a leader in a vacuum, but it needs the cooperation of other human beings.
Effectiveness in organisations should be achieved by the integration of task and human relations requirements or needs. It is important that the principal a balance between the needs and objectives of the organisation and those of his colleagues as espoused by Musaazi (1982) in the nomothetic-idiographic-transactional leadership.
This type of leadership came into being as the failure of the traditional categories of leadership. The nomothetic leader stresses the requirements of the institution, while the idiographic leader is concerned with his personal needs and those of his followers.
On the other hand, the transactional leader represents a compromise between the nomothetic and the idiographic leadership in which the leader appreciates the need to achieve organisational goals but at the same time makes sure that individual members’ needs are not ignored, as they strive towards the institutional goals.
The principal should not ignore the objectives of the school and the plight of teachers and learners. In this way, Namibian schools may avoid the high failure rate.