Joshua Kazanga and Irene Siteketa
They often say, when you fail to plan, then you plan to fail. Currently, the Namibian revised curriculum is perplexing and at points, amiss. Perhaps, the curriculum developers failed to plan? The Cabinet’s decision approved the seven years implementation plan to respond to the challenges and needs of the Namibian society with hope to improve the long and perfectly working plan of the education system that has worked since the early 90s.
The introduction of Advanced Subsidiary (AS) was the perfect choice to improve the education system, but only if it was properly planned and implemented.
Subjects such as Development Studies is offered in grade 10-11 but is currently not offered on AS level. To put this into context, if a learner gets 3 Cs and qualify to do AS, and one of those subjects being Development Studies which is currently not offered on AS, then what would be next for the learner? Re-introduction of technical/vocational subjects is no doubt equipping the learners with amazing skills and knowledge.
However, there’s confusion on the subjects they do and on the pairing of those subjects, so they distinguish them from the mainstream subjects.
Currently, there is no Namcol for learners doing technical/vocational subjects. Where do they upgrade their subjects if they don’t attain the required 3 Cs? Or they should just be proceeding to vocational training centres only? What if they want courses not offered at vocational training centres? Such a catch-22 situation!
The fact remains that the plan to introduce the new curriculum was not understood and there are so many stakeholders that were generally supposed to be involved in the education sector whose involvement in planning and implementation must’ve been compulsory.
Tertiary institutions must’ve been involved too as they help to guide with the proper planning of fields of studies in grade 10-11. Nored, NamWater, Telecom, MTC and other stakeholders should have been included as the syllabi consist of content harder to teach without the provision of services from these companies.