POORLY EDUCATED CHILDREN DAMAGE THE FUTURE

Poorly educated children damage the country’s future, warned the Mayor of Maputo, David Simango, on Monday.Speaking at the opening of the 2012 Mozambican school year, Simango appealed to parents, teachers and the pupils themselves to contribute towards improvements in the quality of education.“It’s not worth wasting time discussing the quality of education, since we already know it’s poor”, he declared. “What we must do now is work to improve the quality of our education”.There is a widespread belief that, although there are more children in Mozambican schools than ever before, this increase in access has been achieved at the cost of a decline in quality. The poor quality of primary education has knock-on effects in secondary schools, as seen by alarming failure rates in December in the exams taken by secondary pupils at the end of 10th and 12th grades.Simango insisted that all stakeholders in education should work to ensure that children know how to read, write and do basic maths, and in this way contribute to the fight against poverty.“For us to have good quality education, we need trained teachers”, he said. “But that is not enough in itself. For if the pupils do not apply themselves, then they are not going to learn. Furthermore, the parents even if they do not have high qualifications themselves, should contribute by accompanying the training of their children. If we were to do this, then we would contribute to raising the quality of education”.The school year opened throughout the country on Monday, under the motto “Let’s make good quality education a task for each and every one of us”.The Maputo City deputy director of education and culture, Alfredo Nahia, told the ceremony that all the vacancies for enrolment in the city’s schools had been filled. There were 71,246 vacancies in first, sixth, eighth and 11th grades – the grades that mark the four cycles into which primary and secondary education are divided.There is no enrolment in the other grades, since pupils move into them automatically from the lower grades.