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Education Unit
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Education - the major pillar of Catholic Church in Ethiopia Catholic Church Education The Catholic Church education system aims at integral human development, socio-economic improvement and spiritual development of the community to ensure the implementation of man-to-man concern by following the Gospel Values that are an expression of the love of Jesus. The Ethiopian Catholic Church is founded on the bases of social, economic, and spiritual development service to all human kind. Its holistic approach includes spiritual formation, intellectual/physical development, and economic capability. The Catholic Church education is guided by the following principles: · Harmony of God’s plan on earth for the poor and marginalized through quality education and respect for human dignity · Ensure individual formation and finally societal advancement · Make sure everyone is capable of doing things right without any discrimination of ethnicity, language, economic status, or political affiliation · Ensure the service of justice, peace, love and equal rights in the society with especial consideration for the poor and marginalized Introduction The Church has devoted to the service of the poor and marginalized through formal and non-formal education since 1845 and its presence in the country is widely recognized and appreciated by all faith groups. Ever since its inception, the Catholic schools remained to be highly respected and well regarded by the people in Ethiopia for the justice, fairness, and equity services rendered throughout. Currently, there are over 320 Educational Institutions that are offering formal education beginning from Kindergarten to Secondary level for all school aged children. The geographical distributions of Catholic schools cover almost all the nine politically defined regional states in the country. Major achievements (last 10 yrs) ECS-Education Unit has been operating on various areas to enhance quality service/education to the citizens. The strategy of education sector were designed to provide technical support to help Diocesan Catholic Secretariats in upgrading the standard of teaching in Catholic Schools, focusing on job training mainly for the teaching staff. The effect was very positive in terms of acquiring quality education and quality management in our learning Institutions. Over the last ten years over 1500 teaching staff were able to receive on job training, particularly, teaching methodology, classroom management, Instructional approach and alike. The Catholic school teachers hardly ever get on job training outside of the Church. The State is restricting its policy for training only State owned Institutions. So, it is very important to keep up to date our teaching staff with the emerging pedagogical approach. A) Within the last ten years other major contributions were developing Catholic Education Policy: this Policy draft was able to stipulate as a framework of a working document for all the Catholic schools. It indeed, helped the schools to follow the principles of the Catholic Church in their daily activities at the school level. B) ECS-Education office in collaboration with the dioceses, integrate activities that are shared with the government Education offices mainly to help facilitate the work of the schools smooth and healthy learning environment. Issues that are not handled by the local diocese are always referred to the National office of the Ethiopian Catholic Secretariat. C) ECS-Education office has prepared Moral/Ethical teaching text books for grades 1-8: this is very crucial for our Catholic schools as a way of preparing and offering human formation for the young children while they are in school training
Major challenges · financial constrains, · change of policy in the education sector by the government · too many request coming from the dioceses for capacity support with little financial inclusion.
Priority intervention areas – foreseen in 2010-2012 1. Education on Climate Change and its negative impact There are over 2,500 teachers working in Ethiopian Catholic educational Intuitions. Working closely with the teachers on climate change awareness education and designing possible means of saving our living planet is critical. Proposing this idea is to begin training teachers at school level so that simultaneously, they too will educate the children at school level. 2. Make Catholic Schools center for awareness raising on HIV/ADIS prevention and control The epidemic of HIV/ADIS is a treat to local and International economic development. This especially, affects the active work force. Educating the generation, beginning from primary education level to Higher learning Institution, will have invaluable contribution to combat the impacts of the disease. The Catholic Church plans to integrate HIV/AIDS prevention and control in the education system. 3 Integrating ethical/moral education in the school system to fight corruption The world, especially that of the developing nation is at a risk because of corruption. Society need to be educated at all level so that everyone will take the lead for fighting corruption at all levels. Corruption is a threat to economic development in the country. The Catholic Church believes that educating the youth will have substantial contribution to fight corruption. 4 Educating parents, community, and stakeholders on Child Right in respect to; ¨ Reduce child abuse of any form ¨ Reduce young girls trafficking, i.e. sex and labor, ¨ Reduce early marriage ¨ Reduce Harmful Traditional Practices (HTP) ¨ Promote Peace education beginning from primary level 5 Education on family values In recent years, family breakdown is increasing from time to time. The Education system plans to cooperate with the Family and Laity Unit to educate the youth on family values, the negative impacts of family breakdown and divorce. 6 Promote functional adult literacy as part of social and development work Non-formal functional/development education to the youth out of school and adults will have positive impact in accelerating the social and development efforts of the Catholic Church. The Education unit of ECS plans to collaborate with the social and development programs to develop curriculum for non-formal education. 7 Assist educators to bring quality of education in the teaching and learning process Teachers need on-going on the job training to acquaint with the changing academic world. This is necessary to achieve through capacity building training in relation to the teaching profession. 8 Building research capacity: ECS should have adequate and up-to-date statistical data of all the Catholic Institutions so that educational needs could be addressed appropriately. The Church of course, is devoted giving need based service in the sector of education but still lack of information and proper documentation about the activities are the basic problems that are observed. 9 Sustainability: schools are facing financial and resource shortage. Dependency syndrome has doomed its future plan. The Education Unit would like to work cooperatively with the schools in terms of awareness creation how to work on local fund raising and networking with schools in the city. Some of our schools are capable of sustaining there own resources through tuition and other collection. Whereas, most of the rural based schools are unable to cope-up with climbing-up of teachers’ salary and other running costs. May be it is better to discuss the issue before it is too late. This is one option but not the best option of courses; however, through discussion we presume that other possibilities might be shared. Address:
Ethiopian Catholic Secretariat
This page was last updated on 10/10/2009 |
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©2005 Ethiopian Catholic Secretariat |