By Dr. Apollo Buregyeya
It’s already Friday evening and I probably am celebrating a good week. So what I share below should not be taken seriously. I don’t trust things said under the influence of alcohol.
Anyway….
A story is told of a 95-year-old woman who had never stepped into a church. One day, a preacher visited her and preached salvation. She listened, smiled, and finally agreed to accept Christ, but not before saying, “Let’s see how many more years this Jesus of yours will give me. Because the devil you just described helped me through the first 95.”
That’s how I feel about Uganda’s old education system.
We now call it outdated. Theoretical. Colonial. But as my friend Eng. Julius Musiimenta rightly put it, the very education we are now rushing to erase is the one that produced engineers who built bridges, doctors who opened chests, and scientists who sent humans to the moon. It worked. Just not here.
This is the curriculum that trained our early professionals. People who built institutions even when the country was falling apart. It raised Ugandans who now manage infrastructure in Europe and perform surgeries in America. The problem was never the syllabus. The problem was the country.
Now we’ve embraced the gospel of competence-based education. Learn by doing. Think critically. Be entrepreneurial.
But here’s the contradiction. We’ve asked knowledge-trained teachers to deliver industrial skills they’ve never used. We’ve told schools with no power or tools to teach production. We’ve introduced innovation in the absence of industry.
We want to teach farming, but fund boda bodas.
We want to teach ethics, but reward corruption.
We want to teach ICT, but outsource every national system to foreign contractors.
We want to teach AI, but skipped the entire industrial age.
And now we say education has failed?
No. What failed is the country around it. The politics. The economy. The reward system.
That old curriculum, for all its theory, carried us through our first 95. It deserves gratitude, not condemnation.
Before we rewrite the syllabus, let’s rewrite the system. Because no curriculum will thrive in a country that kills what it teaches.
And if that sounds like drunken logic, maybe it’s because sober minds gave up speaking long ago.
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