A mind is a terrible thing to waste,” so goes the saying.

The good news is that in Tanzania it is mandatory for parents to send their offspring to school. The not-so-good news is that our public education system is not kind to beautiful, curious and developing young minds.

So when the government announced its new education policy recently, it came as a relief if only because it is possible to write about something non-horrific, unrelated to corruption or incompetence or... wait, scratch that.

Our schools have had a rough few decades of it. The decline of the Tanzanian education system has been well documented so there’s no need to go into detail here.

Suffice it to say that things have become increasingly chaotic and the worse things became the more ludicrous the government’s rapid-response solutions proved to be. Last time I glanced at a national examinations results announcement, I believe I spotted that the pass mark is a solid D and above. Students only need to get 30 per cent of their answers right in a given subject to be considered competent at it.

A new education policy couldn’t possibly come fast enough for these kinds of disastrous circumstances. It is early days, perhaps too soon to tell, but the intentions hinted at by this new education policy seem to be good.

First of all, we have finally got rid of school fees — again. I don’t want to name names of villains here — structural adjustment! — but surely it was obvious from the get go that “cost-sharing” or commodifying education was not going to help a poor country get ahead.

So it is nice to see the government tacitly admit that it made a terrible mistake. The policy brings up another interesting point on school fees. Parents have been complaining for years about private schools and what they charge for their services. So the government proposes to regulate them so that they don’t fleece poor hardworking parents.

This is an interesting side step. For years, the Tanzanian argument has been that the public education system has been undermined by private schools. The point is very specific: The country’s elite send their children to private schools to spare them the horrors of the public education experience. Which removes their incentive to improve the public education system, obviously.

So here’s the thing: Regulating the fees of private schools will in the end benefit a mere fraction of the general public. And a lot of elites, many of whom seem to be part of our civil service.

See how that works? Yup.

Anyways, Tanzania has finally committed to Kiswahili, so English will be dropped as a medium of education according to the new policy. Well, our international image is that of a nation that heroically rejected the colonial language in favour of a national tongue, but that’s not what happened. It has taken some time to actually get Kiswahili properly entrenched as the national language against all other competing languages.

After all that hard slog and propaganda, it is a very reasonable proposition to have Kiswahili as the medium of instruction. Contemporary Kiswahili is such a flexible and voracious creole, I believe it is up to the challenges of 21st century education if we let it develop organically. Is it a bad idea to drop the global lingua franca altogether?

Yes, yes it is. But the way things are going for this country, we probably need to make room for mandatory Basic Mandarin and Basic Cantonese.

And finally, basic education has been extended to 11 years right to the end of Form Four with no culls in between. This may be the best thing about this new policy.

It is also one of the most controversial propositions by the sound of the protests that have been making the rounds on local media. We’re so deeply entrenched in the practice of sorting young developing minds into divisions and hierarchy that an education system in which control via brutish selectivity doesn’t exist scares us.

Which it shouldn’t. Every generation of humans is more intelligent than the last, and I state this with apologies to my elders. Maybe it is time our education system also evolved to embrace that, which by the looks of this policy, it just may.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com.

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