Alliance for Community Action executive director Laura Miti says Zambia now has an education system which produces “frighteningly unanalytical” graduates.

In a statement shared on her Facebook page titled ‘The new Zambian’, Wednesday, Miti lamented that the broken down education system had killed citizens’ ability to think.

“So, for years now, Zambia has run a barely functional education system that produces graduates of universities and colleges who are frighteningly unanalytical and allergic-to-anything-but-absolutely-requisite reading. These young people, meant to be the leaders of thought and invention in their generation, are shockingly embracing of unthought-through, reductionist positions on important questions, both at work and play. They are also generally technically incompetent. Those are the ones who make it. They are our best. We then have the hordes of barely literate holders of the Grade 12 certificate. They too are to be considered successful because, at the bottom of this chart of educational achievement, there are the 70% children who enter grade 1, but are systematically thrown out of the education system before Grade 12. The ones we condemn to illiteracy, simply because we do not have a desk and chair for them. We use exams as the tool of injustice. That totally broken education system has just about killed our ability to think as a nation,” Miti observed.

And Miti observed that the church was compounding the illiteracy problem by feeding congregants with “mind-numbing nonsense”.

“Compounding the very negative impact this under-education/lack of education of a whole generation has had on our rationality as a nation, we have the church. The church, especially the Pentecostal section of it, has taken hold of a good portion of the population and fed them undoctrinal, mind-numbing drivel. Already very myopic because of their failed education, individuals now swallow ultra-nonsense on topics such as satanism and prosperity, which nonsense becomes their lens on life. They expect “Favour” – accomplishment, just because they are them. They are unable, of course, to see the basic irrationally of that position. These individuals, in thousands, run around addressing their Pastor, who thinks of himself as Bishop or some other fancy title, as daddy. In being daddy, pastors across the land, most of them simple conmen, assume a paternalistic control on the personal lives of thousands that God never intended. Thus mind-controlled, a whole section of the Zambian population accepts practices that even a cursory reading of the Bible will show to be erroneous. Having been told that God will punish them if they use their brain on the anointed, the church goers fear to ask questions, when their leaders become astoundingly rich on their offerings,” stated Miti.

“Banned from using their brain in church, they forget how to use it outside. Think of this, it is in the collective hands of this terrifying under-educated and religiously brainwashed Zambian that the wonderful blessing of the internet arrives. Social media now provides everyone with a platform for their thoughts, no matter how unformed those thoughts are. Our new Zambian is therefore able to share dangerously unsound thoughts which are, in turn, believed as fact by others floating in the massive echo chamber occupied by others like him. Together, if told that the quacking, waddling, bird that swims is a chicken, they take that as fact. They refuse to even use the Google that has made them the generation that does not need to get out of bed to learn – to check when the chicken became a duck or vice versa. That above, ladies and gentlemen, is how an accomplished young man dies a stunningly tragic death and, instead of mourning our national loss, the new Zambian declares his death something that was always coming because…….. No, I will not say it. The idiocy of the reason advanced does not bare repeating.”