South Africa doesn’t need another generation of people qualified to analyse its problems. It needs a generation courageous enough to solve them.
“WE will no longer support long essays. If you are an engineering student, for your thesis, you must manufacture, copy or build something.”
Burkina Faso's President Captain Ibrahim Traoré’s words sparked exactly the reaction you would expect. The usual critics dismissed them. Others laughed. Some rushed to explain why Africa should stay in its lane and leave innovation to everyone else.
But perhaps that is precisely the problem. We have become so accustomed to defending the way things have always been that we rarely stop to ask whether those things are actually working.
But perhaps we’re debating the wrong thing. Because whether you agree with Captain Traoré or not, his words force us to confront a question that Africa has avoided for far too long: When did education become about proving what we know instead of proving what we can do?
