Government has gone ahead to implement controversial former Education Minister, Lazarus Dokora’s dejected curriculum.

This comes despite protests from hundreds of thousands of parents and teachers who since last year have been complaining that the curriculum change was too sudden, unplanned and disorderly. Two days ago teachers particularly in the capital city told ZimEye.com the whole education system has been overhauled by and this in a destructive way.  The latest development comes as teachers announced that they are preparing legal papers to take the government to court over what they say is not only a violation of their employment contracts, but also an abuse of students and pupils.

Notwithstanding, Dokora’s successor, Prof Paul Mavima yesterday  moved ahead to launch the second batch of new curriculum textbooks in Harare, procured under the $9 million Education Development Fund (EDF) facility, which is administered by UNICEF.

Mavima said the total number of textbooks procured for the whole country in Phase 1 was 1,2 million. He was quoted by the state media saying, “these books were bought at a total cost of $1,8 million. The textbooks distributed were for ECD A, Grades 1 and 3 as well as Forms 1 and 3. During today’s launch, we will see 60 726 textbooks for the updated curriculum being distributed to three districts – Mazowe District (37 primary and nine secondary), Shamva District (18 primary and five secondary) and Zvimba District (74 primary and 16 secondary).

“The exercise will continue to the rest of the districts, we expect them to get books before the start of the second term. The books for the primary schools are 54 992 and for the secondary schools are 5 734.”