We reject an Education for the 21st Century

It was in June 2020 when the theme of the January 2021 50th World Economic Forum Annual Meeting was announced as "The Great Reset", two months after the forum the Covid-19 virus went into high gear and thus begun the conspiracy theories, me included.

Once the virus was out in the wild the reset begun and we all know that the reset process begins with a the system shutting down which started with air travel as it spread to other slower means of transport, within a few weeks the atmosphere was cleaner than it had been in decades.

It is speculated that at the height of the shutdown, as we awaited the restart, Maasai’s in East Africa were able to revert back to using the stars for navigation as the night skies had become clear enough to see the start, for confirmation we shall need to seek a session with the Oloibon.

Once the world had shutdown completely it was time to boot it back up but with what was expected to have been a new system configuration.

In the US for example the new configuration seems to have included the “great resignation” which resulted in many young people opting to remain in their rural home where they at retreated to at the height of the pandemic to either watch over their parents or because they had lost their jobs and couldn’t afford to pay their rent or mortgages.

Most times the US uses recessions to redeploy their work force, a situation which happens at least every ten years plus or minus 4 years depending on whether they are at war or not. The pandemic seems to have played the role of a recession this time around.

Now since the US Spitting Champion is called the World Spitting Champion it therefore stands that if something has happened in the US then it is deemed global, which could explain why a country such as Kenya insists that they do have Baby Boomer and Millennial Generations as if they exist in the US then they must be a global phenomenon.

In the same breathe, when the reboot was taking place we in Kenya too expected that those who had relocated up-country, we avoid using the word rural as it seems to ilk some natives, would remain there and thus work remotely especially since we are the Sillycon Savannah.

Don’t get me wrong, we do have all the trappings of a digital economy from mobile money to high speed connectivity to the US that covers over 80% of the countries entire land mass not forgetting the our octa-core phones.

But sadly we do not seem to have acquired the requisite mindset of a digital society as for all intents and purposes we are as analogue as out ancestor Zinjanthropus aka NutCracker, we actually export our macadamia nuts in the shell to Europe for cracking.

As part of the lockdown, we were able to shift many activities online such as private schools learning for primary and secondary. Fortunately, for university education teaching went virtual across all universities both private and public.

One of my sons was finishing his 5th Year in Engineering when the pandemic struck and he was able to complete his final year virtually. He was also able to have his graduation ceremony virtually but for some strange reason he was required to rent a gown for the ceremony which he attended while standing in our sitting room but I refuse to lower myself to the level of discussing how the university senate arrived at that requirement.

Another of my sons has done his third and forth year university studies virtually and apart from the few times they were required to sneaked back onto campus to carry out experiments. Being a Zoology major I would have assumed that such experiments could have been done from anywhere across the world but again the professors must know better.

What was interesting is that during those two years he was able to take his examinations and CATs virtually something that some of the private universities, for some strange reason, refused to adopt and instead insisted on physical appearance for the exams.

This reminded me of how sometime in 1998/9 I did my Microsoft Certification exams online so to me it is very strange that 22 years later some of our universities still have no faith in carrying out examinations remotely.

It might also explain why my attempts at getting them to implement electronic digital response systems has been met with solid and unified resistance but I will get to that sometime in the future when the pain has subsided.

Before I forget, my daughter got to sit her A-Levels online and while the same university that refuses to administer examinations electronically had no issue with using her results for acceptance into their degree program.

I realise that most of what I have raised so far has been questions, let us assume that I am applying the Five whys (or 5 whys) iterative interrogative technique to explore the cause-and-effect relationships underlying the problem of why we are stuck with a 1700s method of teaching and evaluation while in the throes of the 21st Century.

From all the personal examples I have shared it is clear that Kenya as a country has everything required to switch to an education system reminiscent of the 21st Century but strangely enough we have totally refused to make the move.

When the public universities needed to go virtual they were able to convince Telkom Kenya to provide Private APN configured SIM cards, a product I had tried to get them to commercialise over 10 years ago, that allowed the students to connect to their virtual classrooms from anywhere in the country where there was a 3G signal.

What that did was provide a virtual private network for the university which meant they did not need to role out their own network or pay the exorbitant charges for accessing servers in the US.

I had expected that the universities would also have deployed Open-source platforms such as Jitsi for communication which could easily integrate to Moodle and other LMS, this would have kept all communications local while at the same time allowing us to develop local elearning capabilities.

But yet again I seem to have over estimated the capabilities of those who train our IT experts.

Now, as soon as the lockdown was lifted our universities as well as our private primary and secondary schools quickly reverted back to the pre-pandemic modus operandi.

With all activities reverting to the Egyptian Middle Kingdom scribes schools of 2061-2010 BC under the direction of Kheti, treasurer to Mentuhotep II with students being taught to transfer knowledge from the teachers text books or PowerPoint slides to their exercise books.

For a very strange reason, we are insistent on training our children for a world that no longer exists and yet every evening exposing them to the tools of the present.

On the reset and specifically for my ilk in the technology space, the world does not have a core router but each country has its own and it seems that someone did not write the configuration changes to the ROM which meant that when the Kenyan router reset it loaded the original configuration from the Queen Victoria version of 1885, can we afford another reboot to activate the 21st Century configuration?