A Pedagogy to Embed into Curricula the Super 4C Skill Sets Essential for Success in Sub-Saharan Africa of the 21st Century

Abstract

At the dawn of independence in Sub-Saharan African countries, the pedagogical practices and curricula that African countries inherited were a legacy of the colonial era. The curricula the colonialists left behind had laid emphasis on the orthodoxy 3Rs of reading, -riting and -arithmetic, and on core academic subjects such as the History of the British Empire, or the Geography of Western Europe. These subjects became the gold standard of being an educated African, good enough to serve in the public service of the colonial administration. As a result, the skills taught and qualifications awarded, were all designed to provide an education tailored to meet the wishes of the colonial masters. The teachers had been trained to teach monograde and not multigame pedagogy, and the result was that the education provided did not teach the skills needed for Sub-Saharan African development. And so, when the colonialists left in the 1950s and 1960s, they left behind countries that lacked the essential training and in particular, lack of human capital development (Becker (1975). It is this human capital that is the most scarce resource in Sub-Saharan Africa. This scarcity, in my view, constitutes the imperative for change in pedagogy in Sub-Saharan Africa so that we may provide education curricula that will graduate students ready to provide the knowledge, skills, experiences, competencies and entrepreneurial abilities essential for success of the SubSaharan African economies in the 21 st century. The change in pedagogy needs to be one that infuses the Core Subjects with what are called the Super 4C Skills of the 2181 century, namely, Critical thinking and problem solving, Collaboration, Creativity and innovation, and Communication.