Education in Ethiopia

By Fikru Helebo

I watched an interesting documentary this past weekend on the topic of "Education in Ethiopia" by Jonathan Dimbleby and his accompanying interview with Meles Zenawi, the prime terrorist of Ethiopia, on the same topic. Ethiopians know Mr. Dimbleby from his ground-breaking report on the 1973-74 Ethiopian famine.

The documentary features the work of British volunteers with the Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), of which Mr. Dimbleby is a president. From what I saw on the video, the VSO volunteers' main mission is to improve the quality of teaching delivered in Ethiopian primary and secondary schools by training Ethiopian teachers to adopt modern teaching methods, such as "active learning", that are child-centered. The volunteers also advise the Ministry of Education in curriculum development and devising standards.

Unless you were a privileged kid who experienced a more open education system offered in one of the few private schools, you know that the Ethiopian education system is not student-centric and does not foster a favorable teacher-student relationship, which is vital to learning. Aside from lack of resources, I believe most would agree that the main obstacle to learning in Ethiopia is our culture which discourages openness. So, it is a breath of fresh air to see what these VSO volunteers are doing to help modernize the Ethiopian education system and I wish them best of luck in their efforts. As long as these volunteers are willing to respect the traditional moral norms of Ethiopia and are not bent on imposing their morality, I hope more of them will give their service to Ethiopia in the future.

But I also recognize that these volunteers are not operating in a vacuum. The Meles regime had to create an environment where these volunteers can come and try to help Ethiopia. Improving access to education is one area where Meles has done a good job and so I will give the devil his due. In the interview with Mr. Dimbley, Meles says his goal now is to improve the quality of education offered in the schools he has helped to build in the last ten years. This, I believe, is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. It is one thing to build buildings, but it is quite another to bring about a change in the education culture where quality teaching and learning takes place in the classrooms.

Meles' record in fostering an education culture that encourages openness is a dismal one to say the least. One of his main accomplishments in his first few years in power was to summarily fire 40 Addis Ababa University professors and lecturers who were opponents of his political views. That was followed by the dismantling of the Ethiopian Teachers Association. Ethiopians should not forget the violent crackdown of peaceful university and high school protesters in 2001 and 2002 who were demanding academic and political freedom. Of course, the massacres of 2005 have finally laid bare Meles' true colors. Was this reality lost on Mr. Dimbleby? Probably not. But Mr. Dimbleby seems to be one of the few who still think that what happened in the aftermath of the May 2005 elections is an anomaly, and in this interview he seems to be making a subtle attempt to rehabilitate Meles' battered image.

Here is what baffles me about Meles: as intellectually capable as he is, why does he fail to recognize that Ethiopia will need the good will and cooperation of an overwhelming majority, if not all, of her citizens to achieve the education goals that he says he wants to achieve? He has continuously alienated the cream of the crop in Ethiopian education in his many years, too many years, in power and to think that he can change the education culture of Ethiopia for the better without their active participation is foolish!