I have heard people say History is difficult because it requires you to remember the years in which certain events took place. David Livingstone set his eyes on Lake Malawi in 1859; Henry Henderson established Blantyre Mission in 1876; the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank to the bottom of the Atlantic in 1912; Kamuzu Banda came back to Malawi in 1958. These, and thousands of other dates, are what those Malawians interested in History may remember. I presented them here effortlessly.
Interestingly, the majority of those that would have difficulty remembering these, or similar, dates would effortlessly tell you their birthdays or their wedding days or indeed those of their close associates. The only dates that are forgotten by anybody are the ones that are remotely associated with them. Anything to do with an individual will be held dearly by that individual and by those close to them.
Facts make sense only if they have a bearing on you, otherwise they are little more than unintelligible gibberish. I have narrated, in my past articles, the story of a fish seller who once bought a Physics book on one of whose pages was printed Einstein’s energy equation showing the relationship between energy and mass. He tore off that page and used it as a fish wrapper without showing any signs of regret. This was because he could not relate to the energy equation, which, to a trained Physicist, is the basis for atomic or nuclear energy.
Some years ago, a lady I respected told me that anything that displayed chemical symbols used to turn her off. She would not continue to read any text if it contained chemical symbols. Many people share the same phobia. They struggle to attach meaning to chemical symbols. That we, human beings, are masses of protoplasm which is basically a soup of carbon chains with inorganic elements like Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Calcium and others, is something we are not accustomed to thinking in terms of. It takes a very gentle explanation for people to come to terms with such information.
This is where we, Africans, appear to have missed it. I have come across very few instructors who were able to bring their subject matter down to level of their learners’ experience. I learnt about air and water pressure in primary school, for example, but no attempt was made by any of my teachers to show me what pressure could do. It was only when I boiled water in a sealed can, at home, and witnessed an explosion, that I began to understand the power of steam pressure. Today, many years later, I do not have any difficulty appreciating that steam could drive large vessels like the ill-fated Titanic.
Failure by our teachers and tutors to show how people can relate to the subjects they teach has led to an education system that, at best, is regarded as irrelevant. Being irrelevant, it is easily thrown away and trampled underfoot. It is common in Africa for pupils or students to go over the Moon and throw away books, for good, when they get to what is considered the end of their formal education. They get elated by the feeling of breaking free from the “tyranny” of education. Not surprisingly, that all they see in education is irrelevance upon irrelevance!
We must search within our education system and explore ways of making the material that people learn, relevant to their way of life, their culture. Many things would be demystified if this kind approach was taken. Chemical symbols, for example, would cease to be abstract and without meaning. Many physical phenomena would not puzzle people any more. I am looking forward to the day when the language of Physics, Biology, Economics, Psychology, Mathematics, and the whole gamut of academic disciplines will become common language used by common people in common and ordinary conversations. It is only when it permeates our cultural fabric that we will begin to repeat the dividends it has to offer.
Talking about animation (the art of making stationery objects appear to be moving) Ryan McLeod said the following in his book titled Animation Handbook: “by bending the Physics of time and motion we bring something otherwise inanimate closer to life, where we are better equipped to relate to and understand it.” If all the complex concepts we learn in school could be brought “closer to life” we would indeed be better equipped to understand them. Far too many of them, unfortunately, remain outside the familiar territory of their recipients. We should make them an integral part of our culture like our Asian counterparts have done.