By Lisa Nyanhongo

PARENTS and guardians, coalescing under the Our Zimbabwe campaign, have petitioned parliament to initiate proceedings to scrap the new curriculum, arguing it is too expensive and ill conceived.

The new curriculum, which includes the sticky Continuous Assessment Learning Activity (CALA), was introduced in 2015 under highly acrimonious circumstances by the then education minister Lazarus Dokora.

It has seen parents forking out large sums of US dollars for numerous projects.

Leaners are being asked to pay for at least 20 such projects per term.

The petition, signed by over 10 000 parents, says the new curriculum is not just expensive and rushed but is also discriminating rural pupils who cannot afford the required resources to compete with their urban counterparts, let alone complete CALA projects of their own.

“There was no adequate consultation with key stakeholders including teachers and parents. The curriculum was rushed, it is important to consult key stakeholders before any policy is passed and for it to  be meaningful and relevant.” read the petition.

“The objectives of any curriculum cannot be achieved if it is not well planned and implemented. While we agree with the fact that there is need to modernise our education system in order to align it with global trends and modern technologies to enable our children to be fully participating members of the global community, this is not possible in our situation where we  have obsolete education facilities and an unmotivated teaching fraternity.

“Students, especially in rural communities, have no electricity, computers and internet access to meet most of the CALA  requirements.”