A diploma on the wall feeds the ego, real impact feeds the people

Alberto Mudjadju"

For example, training 500 engineers a year but still lacking piped water in the neighborhood; having 2,000 management graduates but the company closing because nobody knows how to manage cash flow. Meanwhile, the real impact has to do with some internal difficulties that we should be solving, such as: whether we still need to call in external consultants to solve what our own graduates should be doing. For instance, we have an engineer on the wall who doesn't know the difference between propane and...-42°C and Butane a-0.5°C, while in real-world impact the technician ensures that the butane tanker unloads in Matola without accident and without delay. Just like a student who memorizes the width of the Strait of Hormuz for the exam and forgets it the next day, while someone who favors real-world impact designs a doctrine to protect the Mozambique Channel. If we want to seriously talk about development, we have to stop counting diplomas and start counting problems solved, hence the thermometer to measure the quality of education is its ability to solve society's problems, because quality education is not just a high grade on the exam, but rather when what is learned in the classroom solves something outside in the community. This is reflected, for example, in medicine when there are fewer preventable deaths in the hospital, in engineering when bridges don't collapse and water arrives without interruption, in agriculture when the technician increases the farmer's production, in the military when officers plan operations in operational theaters with fewer casualties and more stabilization. In short, if education doesn't change the street, the neighborhood, the city, the province, the region, the country, then it's just decoration.

When the thermometer used to measure the quality of education, or the difference between the diploma on the wall and its real impact, is ignored, there is a serious risk of creating many frustrated individuals. With thousands of graduates, the problem persists, and as a consequence, young people with degrees become easy targets for recruitment by political parties, churches, or armed groups; perpetual dependency, where if the University doesn't solve the water problem, for example, we will continue to call in a foreign consultant to dig a well; education focused solely on paper, where the school becomes a machine for passing grades, not for solving problems. The University should demand that a Mechanical Engineering student, for example, solve the transportation problems within their neighborhood or district. It shouldn't be the professor who has the final say on whether a student is good or not; rather, society, as well as hospitals, companies, and military barracks, should determine whether the graduate is suitable for the objectives of the profession or not. The teaching model that emerged in Germany after the Second World War, in which the population brought their problems to the University, which then solved them and returned the answers to the community (hence the emergence of extension workers, a kind of extension of the University within the community, which is why all Universities have extension offices or departments to support the community). Universities must respond to the real problems of the population, which is why it is said...ʺUniversity that ntheit smells to the people, stheIt smells like paper.ʺ.  

2025/12/3