POLICY-MAKERS MUST REVIVE THE SHIFTING GAINS OF KENYA’S EDUCATION SYSTEM
There was a time when Kenya boasted a solid high quality education system. That was a time when the product of the system was a revered worker endowed with unique skills, commitment and a sense of humility that was the envy of many in the region. Not anymore in Kenya!
There was indeed a time when schools were adequately resourced and teachers were proud of being teachers and we all rushed to school to learn and get an education. These were times when the teacher was a respected person, a leader and professional that communities valued, supported and protected. In my village for instance, teachers’ homes were used as reference points for those who could not trace their relatives!
That time teachers were guided by ethics, a clear sense of duty and a morality of their own profession. Their relationship with pupils was parent-like, always full of support and wise counsel on everything that kept children away from danger and evil.
These were times when the school system came to be characterized by an ethos of palpable discipline, clarity and dedication of purpose for the learners, teachers and parents. You had a sense of positive competition for good behaviour; a great drive to perform and earn the accolades, decorations and recognition of teachers and parents alike. Not anymore in Kenya!
Today the school is a hostile environment for children, more so for girls and learners with special needs. Well-meaning investment in education has to contend with phenomenal numbers of largely disinterested children, deployment of unqualified, intensely disenchanted teachers and a perennial shortage of the most basic teaching and learning materials.
So hostile are schools that normal leaner discipline is in short supply, now confused with meek imbecility and conflict with the exercise of rights and freedoms. Violence and angry reaction to school challenges have become acceptable almost promotable means of expression for a generation which at the same time is supposedly being prepared to run a country desperate for peace and calm, law and order.
Teachers are not any better! The ethics that guided the once noble profession have dissipated, replaced by a form of vulgarity in dress, grooming, language and lewd relationships with school minors. What you now have are teacher-pupil wars as enlightened parents champion child rights and freedoms claimed by many children at the expense of leadership skills and responsible citizenship.
Due to child neglect, child poverty, uncritical adoption of western type permissive child-rearing approaches and a failing education system, Kenya continues to lose large proportions of its young generation to anti-social habits among them drug abuse, alcoholism, commercial sex and a pervasive youth culture of quick money for a quick fix.
But a good education system can be the greatest pillar of any nation’s development. It is in fact the single-most important driver of economic empowerment for citizens. Educated citizens are able to earn an income, produce more food through agricultural initiatives, and feed their children. Children who complete primary education are more likely to achieve food security as adults and end the cycle of poverty in their generation.
Education increases people’s confidence, enabling them to become self-sufficient, fully contributing members of their communities. A good system of education encourages gender equity, knowing that girls and women who achieve higher levels of education are greater contributors to overall economic development and to children’s welfare within communities. This is an essential factor in sustainable poverty alleviation.
Through various policy reforms, the government has managed to reduce the costs of education in the country. Primary school fees was abolished during Kibaki’s reign. More and more initiatives are in place to make secondary education and tertiary level education cheaper. New and better schools are being built, with teachers being recruited annually although their ratio to students remains a worrying statistic. There are still government initiatives to make our primary education digital.
Despite all these efforts to make education a path to greatness, we watch students burn down schools property. We listen and raise eyebrows when a news headline appears where a teacher has molested their very own students. We now have students who are interested in constitutional rights than morality. We have teachers who simply collude with those who have access to the examination papers, money is exchanged, and students pass with flying colors. Morality and discipline in our schools disappeared long time ago. Students are now being found idling in illicit brew dens. Where are the schools’ management and parents in all these? Is it that our curriculum has been diluted and discipline dropped? Is it that the policy reforms and strategies crafted to address slipping education standards have been either inappropriate or inadequately pursued?
The system has produced millions of miseducated, corrupt, tribal and largely unskilled people who cannot productively be absorbed by the economy, creating instead a sprawling and inefficient informal economic sector. Many Kenyans who have gone through this system are still mired in politics of tribalism threatening the country’s division and hacking at the very heart of nation building. It is sad that education has been unwittingly used as a tool for division not unity.
But I remain optimistic. I am a product of the same system. I look forward to the day when our policy-makers will think of measures to bring back sanity in our education. The days when discipline was part of every school‘s motto. I look forward to the day when we shall have neither private nor public schools. But as long as they are running away from sorting the mess in our schools, and taking their own children to private and international schools, the education sector remains in a quagmire. There is indeed urgent need to work on an education system that builds moral fibre for quality teaching, learning and discipline in our nation.