One of the greatest challenges of our modern era is to build and nurture sustainable communities. That is to say, we must make sure that our social, cultural and physical environments in which we can satisfy our needs and aspirations are not short-term oriented but rather could uplift us to our goals without diminishing the changes of our future generation(Ugo and Capra 2015). However, these goals cannot be achieved where our educational mechanisms are not in love with nature. Understanding nature is one thing and responding to it another. When we make our curriculums to interact with nature harmoniously, we are at the point of understanding our Eco-sustainability. If children are made to understand better the generative and not only the extractive processes of their ecosystem, we are beginning to model up peaceful generations.
The Gambia needs a fundamental shift from eating only to producing what to eat. This must be achieved through a better educational mechanism which in this text will be called the systematic approach. This paradigm shift from consumption to production is what our educational perceptive is blind to. When children are thought agriculture without taking them to fields for real practices, it shows how unserious or unapt our approaches are. If the national stores are equipped from framing and agriculture is made to be understood as a poor man’s profession, the great fiasco of our society salutes us. If agriculture is made optional for students and they have to study it(while benefiting from it) starting from the middle schools, I assumed a failure in this democratic process in our curriculum.
Priorities must be administered even it means limitation to other freedoms. The GDP is of course first in our national goals and which largely is agriculturally based but providing food, employment, and living harmoniously within our environments is second to nothing. If The Gambia is serious about maintain a recognisable flag, children must be made to understand their culture. A sustainable community is designed in such a manner that its ways of life, businesses, economy, physical structures and technologies are maintainable and that they do not interfere with nature. What is transparent in the curriculum of The Gambia from all spares is the blind vision of chasing what we do not have by nature nor by our own creation. In a blessed land of less than 2 million people are welcome by what overpopulated societies are striving from. Poverty, diseases, teenage pregnancies, urbanization, pollution, conflict with self and nature are all occurrences emanating from our poor institutions primarily dictated by our curriculum. When a community fails to know itself, it is by will doomed to self-destruction.
What is to be sustained in a sustainable society is not super economic growth, competitive advantage or any other measures used by western economists, but rather the entire web of life in which our long-term survival depends. This common ecosystem approach is what our curriculum should call for and not inducing aspirations for only uncreated white colour jobs which eternally is failing our society. When culture is overlooked and thrown at the dustbin, children learn to grasp what they see. The Gambian culture is not a flamboyant style of life where children are made to understand academic excellence to be the only way out. In fact, our curriculum is structured in such a way that compelled the locals to belittle their own potentials after failing exams most of which are farfetched and does not depict the reality on the ground. Many if not most Gambians are condemned from perusing their academic goals if they cannot score a good grade in Maths and English to be either enrol into the university or college systems without giving due regards to bases of achieving that great goal. Many of those brains unfortunately become the devils workshop. Encouraging potentials in these areas is good, however, it should not pause the majority into hallucination. Our educational systems should conform to the priorities of our community and involve all. When the curriculum annually failed many people than it does to promote them, then something is wrong somewhere. After all, why academic excellence where jobs are not merit based. Why academic excellence where there are no ready-made jobs? Why promotion of the most privileged against the less privileged? This is the introduction of capitalism into a common society where people are equated depending on where you come from! It does not suit a population of less than 2 million people.
Why this unnecessary goal might find origins from our colonial heritage, it could also be an induction of a private interest against the rest. The betterment of private academic institutions and the negligence of public ones is no difference. Why do one have to be born to a rich parents or academics before you are recognised has it bases to what our curriculum teaches.
To facilitate this understanding, one will have to look thoroughly into The Gambian educational systems where syllabus are nearly all exam oriented and are under continuous changes to satisfy academic excellence. Rather than looking at what our sustainability is based upon, we are merely focused at stopping the majority for being “less intelligent” or less privileged. In fact, the culture of education in The Gambia is not Gambian. It will continue to fail us until we understand our common good- that academic excellence is not a necessity.
As a consequence of this approach, academic institutions have a culture of selfish competition that does little good to the general public. Today’s academic approach in The Gambia is a mere contextual interpretation from tutors wearing strange cloths. Why is this unfitting force binding and enforceable? I will assume that, the architects of this very curriculum are outside our borders but remote controlling their benefits. Even those who made it to this goal of academic excellence are not self-evident since they have a foreign knowledge. They cannot implement it well and where they are forced to, leads to economic, social and political backwardness. Our laws should begin to be self-evident and promoting not otherwise. While most of the problems this curriculum is inducing cannot be discussed here, its wrong approach in not uplifting the majority means our total generational fiasco and the promotion of private interests!
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