Guest column :  Eddie Cross This might seem to be something that is taken for granted, but I think it is even more important today than perhaps at any time in the history of the world. Even today it is possible for an illiterate individual to become a millionaire, but they are the exception. By and large the new economy we are moving into requires that our children receive an education which is not only completely different to what I received but is actually the platform they require to make a living in the new world order. Go back in history and you will find that education was generally a privilege of the wealthy and the powerful. The rest of society (the great majority) received little or no education and were condemned to life as serfs in a feudal society. Then came the Christian church and the printing of the Bible. It became important to teach ordinary people how to read and write and the norms of Christianity opened up society to the values we take for granted today. It was this movement that laid the foundations for the industrial revolution in Europe that spread across the world. When Christian Europe and America became global powers, the church became wealthy and the great missionary movements emerged with thousands of educated and dedicated individuals travelling abroad and bringing the light of the gospel to the “dark continents”. In Zimbabwe this shift in global thinking, brought into the country the great missionary societies and by the middle of the last century 95% of all educational services for the indigenous population of this country was being provided by the church. In some cases, this process created schools with dedicated and highly educated staff who worked for a fraction of their real value and brought a very high standard of education as well as their faith and culture to a small, but growing minority of the local population. It was out of this generation that the fathers of the liberation process, that brought us to independence in 1980, emerged. Herbert Chitepo, Ndabaningi Sithole, Joshua Nkomo; the list could go on for pages. These were the pioneers of the new Zimbabwe. Then there was a flurry of change after independence. We built a new school everyday. We poured money we did not have into health and education and massively expanded the pre-independence system to make it possible for all our children to go to school. By 1990, Zimbabwe had the highest ratio of literacy in Africa. African States emerging from their own decolonisation processes with a tiny group of educated citizens (in some cases less than a handful of graduates), found that they could tap into the educated people of Zimbabwe for accountants, engineers, teachers and health workers. 600 000 well-educated Zimbabweans moved into South Africa after the changes in 1994 to take up posts across the public and private sectors that their own black majority could not fill because under Apartheid, education for the “Bantu” people had been distorted and held back. In neighbouring Botswana, Zimbabweans became the backbone of the educat