Through the debates that we used to hold on a variety of topics, we got to know many new English words. Many of them were real words; few, however, were fake words, being made up by the speakers. I remember one speaker once unleashing a word which did not sound real: diskomkwinya. It was a corruption of discontinue.
The fake words notwithstanding, these were remarkable times when you consider that the debates were taking place in primary school. I must have been in standard 6 when I first participated in such debates. Your guess is as good as mine if today’s standard 6 pupils in a public primary school can hold a debate in any language.
If truth be told, our schools have a lost so much over the past tens of years. Physical Education (PE), for example, is no longer pursued or is only pursued half heartedly. My sister used to be a primary school teacher and once told me that subjects that were not examinable were simply abandoned by the majority of teachers in public schools. Teachers did not see the wisdom of getting boggled down by subjects which would not be examined at standard eight.
But what wisdom is there when you deny your pupils the benefits of the subjects you drop. Perhaps the problem lies in realising what benefits subjects like PE offer. Battaglia and others conducted a piece of research among pre-school pupils in Italy and registered a positive correlation between physical education and locomotor as well as object control skills. Put more simply, physical education improves the coordination skills of the pupils who participate in it. Besides, experts agree that physical education has numerous other benefits including building healthy bones, improving strength and endurance, reducing stress and anxiety and reducing feelings of depression.
I am reliably informed that the only sports disciplines still being pursued in our primary schools are football and netball. High jump, long jump, pole vault, 100 metres, relay race, cross country race and other similar disciplines have long been forgotten. If you mention shot put or javelin to today’s pupils, you might as well be speaking the language of aliens and you may be considered a citizen of extraterrestrial worlds.
As I have pointed out in some past articles, many of these disciplines do not so much as require some investment. A teacher can wake up one morning and decide to organise a 100 metre race without having to buy any equipment. I have said it before that it is possible to use tree branches and stalks of grass to construct high jump equipment. Besides this, all you need to do is dig up a shallow pit which you fill with sand or sawdust to cushion the landing. Once that is done, you are ready for high jump, practically without any expenditure. Save football and netball, the teachers just do not have the will to engage their pupils in sports or physical education. Once upon a time, even public primary schools in rural areas used to frequently compete in these sports.
Handicraft is one discipline which has long been forgotten, along with physical education and non-football/netball sports. Pupils used to have the opportunity to showcase the dexterity of their hands by fashioning all manner of articles using locally available materials. I learnt how to make ropes from sisal fibre, how to convert maize cob covers into mats or hats and how to make other similar articles in handicraft.
Dexterity may easily be looked down upon but it is precisely this skill that made one African American, Benjamin Carson, become the world class neurosurgeon that he has been. One of the books he has written to share his success story is titled “Gifted Hands”. Making full use of his gifted hands Carson went on to perform procedures on patients that had been written off. He, for example, revived an almost abandoned procedure called hemispherectomy in which he would open up the skull of a patient, remove part of his/her brain and close them up, all this to treat seizures. The results were remarkable. The first patient on whom he performed such a procedure was a little girl called Maranda Francisco. Her parents had become extremely desperate and exasperate when they turned in to Johns Hopkins Hospital to seek the attention of Ben Carson. That time Maranda was having seizure attacks literally every three minutes. Carson performed hemispherectomy on the girl and the seizures stopped.
Let us search within our schools and find the talent that can be developed through Physicaal education or sports or handicraft to something approaching the talent of Ben Carson.