The Chronicle
Editorial Comment
27 August 2010
Zimbabwe prides itself in having one of the highest literacy rate on the continent, a feat that took many years of investment in education to achieve. The quality of education is determined largely by the quality of teaching material and the competence of those imparting the knowledge.
The state of the economy has weighed heavily on the quality of education in the country due to the massive brain drain manifested through the large numbers of educators leaving the country for greener pastures over the past decade.
Though the advent of information technology has seen tertiary institutions rely on the Internet for research for their students, the country’s education system still relies largely on books. It is through the use of books that the country improved its literacy rate over the years, and sustained it.
Librarians meeting in Nyanga at a conference this week noted that investment in books and libraries had declined and warned that this had far reaching implications on the educational standards in the country.
We believe the country should develop a reading culture through supporting the local publishing industry to make local products affordable.
Local writers have the capacity to produce a lot of reading material and in our own languages for use in our schools if they receive the necessary support. We believe the industry should lobby for more resources from the Government since it plays a very important role in the education of the nation. For the reading material to make an impact, it should be affordable and readily available, hence the need for incentives for the publishers to achieve this.
We carried an article this week in which a local college was producing examination study packs in a bid to improve pass-rates and we believe such initiatives, if replicated on a large scale, could change the face of the publishing industry in the country.
A project to print primary school books through a Government co-ordinated programme is starting to bear fruit and it is our hope that this will bring life to our publishing industry that in turn will empower our people through providing information, the vital impetus to development.
“Information is vital for political, economic and social development, hence the libraries are courts of last resort,†said Education, Sport, Arts and Culture Minister David Coltart when he addressed librarians.
The librarians urged the Government to waive duty on book imports since the country’s publishers were not producing books anymore. This, they said, would ensure that the imported books would be affordable to readers. While in the short term, this might look like a solution, this is not sustainable in the long run since what the country needs is a strong publishing industry supported by its academics and a strong book reading culture that libraries also help in promoting.