DAR ES SALAAM, May 25 (Xinhua) -- Education experts on Saturday urged Tanzanian government to overhaul the east African nation's school curriculum for public primary and secondary schools to help support the country's ambitious industrialization drive.
The experts, speaking at the 11th Mwalimu Julius Nyerere Intellectual Festival, the experts observed that the curriculum should enable students to acquire skilled knowledge and become drivers of the industrialization agenda aimed at enabling the country to attain the middle income status by 2025.
The festival, an annual event named after Tanzania's founding president, brings together scholars from various fields to discuss the country's social, political and economic issues, and finding solutions to them.
They said underlying any successful industrial policy of any particular country required skilled knowledge starting from primary and secondary schools onwards.
Kalafunja Osaki, a professor from the St. Augustine University of Tanzania, said, "Curriculum should be designed in such a way that they provide three important things that are essential for industrialization."
He mentioned them as general knowledge, individual development and social skills.
"It is very important to give students a room of doing what they think they are best at instead of assuming that everyone is destined to be a professor or degree holder," Osaki told his audience at the University of Dar es Salaam.
He said schools were supposed to be interpreters of the government's industrial policy.
Subirego Kejo, a lecturer from the University of Dar es Salaam College of Education, said there were several competencies, which were crucial in building an industrial economy that should be reflected from both primary and secondary education curriculum.
These include improving the quality of science education, enhancing information and communication technology skills and promoting creativity and problem-solving.
Kejo mentioned other competencies as promotion of a culture of saving and investment, promotion of a culture of hardworking, entrepreneurship, self-development, responsibility, discipline, self-confidence and innovation.
"These are the qualities that we aspire to instill in our people. However, all these should start being built from early stages of education," Kejo added.
