Education is the best deal on the planet. For a modest investment one can harvest the knowledge distilled from thousands of generations of human evolution.
Moving up the ladder allows one to improve upon and generate new knowledge. Nations benefit from this public good by supporting institutions for collecting and imparting knowledge to their citizens.
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The leaders of newly independent Kenya clearly understood this. While many newly independent African nations were expending resources on the military and grandiose projects, Kenya was building up its human capital.
That investment has served the nation well. One of education’s prime benefits is the capacity to domesticate our more violent impulses and anti-social behaviours, and this was reflected in Kenya’s reputation as a peaceful and progressive nation.
Success, however, has also impeded sectoral reform and innovation, leading to the violence erupting in school compounds across the country.
Kenya embraced and replicated the British educational model imported by its colonial rulers. Kenyans progressed but the educational system did not.
By the 1970s, the challenges facing the nation were exposing the limits of the elitist model, and failure to act upon this is responsible for the conflagration consuming the system from within.
ALTHOUGH THE BEST STUDENT WILL do well regardless of the conditions, the quality generated at the top of the educational monoculture has acted to overshadow the system’s bipolar contradictions.
The 8-4-4 reforms attempted to make education more relevant to the masses while retaining the system’s fossilised structures.
More subjects increased the demands on students’ time and energies while lowering the quality of learning.
Test scores have become a tractor beam preventing adaptation to a rapidly changing world. The rankings based on schools’ national exam results confer status and income, but act to marginalise extra-curricular activities that are equally important for equipping students to operate in the outside environment.
Two tests measuring the ability to memorise facts and to process numerical data exert a disproportionate influence on young learners’ futures. The stakes resting on a single examination ratchet up the pressure on students to unproductive levels and can lead to tragic outcomes.
Children become estranged from their parents, fathers beat their sons (last year a father killed his son when he failed to get straight As); cases of student suicide are not uncommon.
The maladaptive association between testing and instrumental goals highlighted by the furore over mock exams is a primary symptom of the malaise.
Administrators blame indiscipline and drugs; lax parents too feature high on the list. The problems extend to the upper levels of the educational system, yet the response has focused on retrenching the sector’s straitjacketed management regime.
BUT TRUNDLING OUT THE USUAL SUSpects only perpetuates a number of ills that from time to time re-emerge with a bang, like the latest round of rioting and burning.
The phenomenon is hardly new, but this time the chaos spread like wildfire, engulfing hundreds of schools and amplifying the critical need to re-evaluate the country’s failing educational model.
Learning is an open-ended process but Kenyan pedagogy is regimental. The playing field is uneven and the rewards encourage foul play.
Students are punished when caught yet the facilitators go unpunished. Small wonder mock exams triggered a major uprising.
The issues raised run much deeper, especially in boarding schools. From a systems-level perspective, the combination of deep-seated problems and the responses they have generated invite comparisons with other highly centralised regimes and dictatorships.
From the outside, many secondary schools appear to be model institutions. Some are; others come close.
From the inside, however, many schools are juvenile prisons where those “fortunate” enough to gain entry endure the trials of military boot camp while coping with an internal order more characteristic of Lord of the Flies than the green fields of Eton.
Kenyans adopted the colonial education model at a time when the economy was primarily agrarian and the population was under 10 million.
The rules that worked when education facilitated Africanisation and most students came from rural backgrounds no longer obtain. The population has trebled and the challenges are now different.
Learned professionals shun information technology and regard computers to be secretarial tools. Their colleagues in the educational sector prioritise building dormitories to keep students in, then cite fiscal constraints to keep the Internet out.
Entropy has overtaken the elitist model, and under these conditions the traditional mechanisms for managing the sector backfire. It follows that many of the system’s strengths have not carried over into the societal milieu.
Reading is an instrumental skill, not a voluntary activity. The market for reading materials furnishes the most obvious evidence of this syndrome.
When Mombasa’s Hussein Stationers closed sometime in the early 1990s, it left Kenya’s second largest city with a single shelf of non-technical books.
Kenya’s other non 8-4-4 bookstores could be counted on two hands and were concentrated exclusively in Nairobi until Nakumatt began to open branches in other towns.
This underlines the fact that far too many educated Kenyans rarely crack open a book.
The popularity of soap operas and Spanish telenovelas on the tube are a poor reflection of the high station accorded to school drama, and sports are neglected in comparison — which is rather amazing considering Kenya’s prominent profile in global arenas.
SPORTS PROVIDE AN OUTLET FOR the youth’s competitive energies while teaching fair play and teamwork.
My own experience coaching in local secondary schools showed the latter to be sorely lacking and the former in need of positive reinforcement and both problems resurface in the form of Kenya’s sports officials.
Knowledge is power, but in Kenya certificates are even more powerful.
The quest for credentials has seen secondary schools become the system’s prison-factories and universities devolve into training institutes qualifying graduates to compete with age-mates who entered the job market before them.
The frustrations faced by university leavers who entered the police force only to remain constables illustrate the inverted relationship between education and occupational mobility in some fields.
These contradictions mirror the broader impact of unbridled commercialisation that has devalued the formerly elite status of educationalists and scholars.
Kenyan intellectuals’ ability to challenge the nation’s leadership and institutions faded during the Moi era and their role fell to the lawyers.
The wily president used a range of methods to neutralise the pesky professoriate — detention, harassment, freezing salaries while overloading them by increasing student intake, and recruiting them into the government.
In 1990, the professor emeritus of Kenya’s applied politics declared victory in a speech at Moi University, singling out political science as the kind of unproductive discipline students should avoid.
Indigenisation of Kenya’s political discourse was in any event overdue; why read Shakespeare when you can watch King Lear and Hamlet being faithfully acted out live on the national stage?
Well, the reasons are many. For one, it is easy to draw the wrong lessons without proper guidance and discussion of a text’s meaning.
In “Generation Disaster,” an article published in this paper at the height of the post-electoral crisis, Martin Kimani demonstrated as much. The same tendency to imitate and not to avoid the tragic human flaws illuminated in the classics contributes to the educational impasse.
This is hardly a uniquely Kenyan problem and even if the education system has become overly robotic, Kenyan society remains impressively dynamic.
The eruption of school violence should not distort the pre-existing case for reform.
Moody Awori reformed the prison system by injecting a measure of kindness and low-cost improvements.
The education minister appeared to take the opposite tack by revoking small privileges and beefing up the educational police state. He was backed by parents who expect schools to act in loco parentis.
They blame teachers, the teachers blame parents, and most everyone cites student indiscipline — even while the system’s primary stakeholders attribute their actions to accumulating frustrations due to their lack of a voice.
MEMORISING THE PARTS OF A FROG is an abstract exercise testing students’ ability to retain information.
Strengthening the brain’s recall function enhances our ability to process information.
But how do you account for my neighbourhood chemist boasting about graduating with honours in mathematics while tallying up simple sums on a calculator?
Training students to use knowledge for solving real-world problems, in contrast, requires developing learners’ capacity to think and to distil answers from a wide range of information.
At this juncture, when conventional solutions are no longer adequate for many of the challenges facing the nation, decolonising the rigidly hierarchical system is at least part of the answer to Kenya’s educational conundrum.
Universal access to primary education was a step in this direction.
Improving the relevance of educational content is arguably the next. Students can provide invaluable input for developing a pedagogical approach to that by fostering discipline from within, thus reducing the need to impose it from without.
Investing them with a degree of responsibility for their own future is certainly more likely to quell the spreading rebellion than banning mobile phones and hip-hop on school buses.
Paul Goldsmith is a researcher based in Meru
