Popular Democratic Movement (PDM) parliamentarian Nico Smit last week tabled a motion in the National Assembly in which he called on educators to consider raising the minimum entry requirements for teaching students to improve the quality of education in the country.
The normal basic requirement to study education at the University of Namibia (Unam) is 25 points in five subjects, including a C symbol in English while it is lower at other private universities.
Smit who tabled the motion in parliament last week described the country’s current education system as dire to the extent that he is not even sure that there is any way to fix it, citing the current fiasco of grade 11 learners.
He said for the country to produce quality teachers, the minimum entry requirements for teaching students should be raised from the current 25 points to 30 points just like in Finland where “only students with the highest marks are allowed to train as teachers”.
“We must also stop the automatic promotion of learners,” he stressed.
“We need to refer this whole issue of our education system to an independent commission that can come up with a way to reverse the disastrous situation we find ourselves in. We must throw everything we have at fixing our pre-and primary schools and our pre-and primary school teachers training.”
He said the PDM and before DTA has been trying to convince the education ministry for the past 30 years that they are on the wrong track regarding education.
“Already during His Excellency President Sam Nujoma terms, we submitted a document to his commission of inquiry suggesting a different approach, but once again our document was disregarded,” he said.
Summing up what then DTA suggested 30 years ago, Smit said his party suggested for teachers in the pre-primary and primary phase to be intensively trained, for there to be no more than 25 learners in any classroom in the primary school and also for the automatic promotion of learners to be done away with.
“This is the phase where children learn to read with understanding, calculate with understanding and write with sense – the three Rs in education that forms the basis thereof,” he said. According to Smit, when a teacher is untrained in very difficult skills and is also expected to control more than 50 learners, the results will be obvious to failure.