Our exam-centric education system has turned
our school into grade factories. The only thing we value is a grade. In the
mindless pursuit of grades we have murdered the soul of education, defiled the wondrous
creative instincts of our children. Our schools have become graveyards of
creativity and innovation.
Reading to the nation the names of top KCPE
candidates does not teach modesty. It reinforces an attitude of preening and
self-idolatry among adolescents. Moreover, holding aloft top students in
celebration is in my view absurd. Granted, we must honor stellar achievers, but
hoisting them in front of television cameras is national veneration of grades. As
I listened to one of the so-called top KCPE candidates talk about the “secrets”
of their success, I wondered what we had turned our children into. The hubris
was horrifying.
Passing through Kenya’s public school
curriculum is a gruesome process of protracted death to the creative self. The
national curriculum offers too little of playful curiosity and creative
discovery, which is the nature of our species. In my experience schools that
offer the national curriculum are a strange organism – one-third penitentiary,
one-third military camp and one-third monastery.
The red-hot currency of our education is rote
learning and regurgitation of facts. It does not matter whether the student can
argue a position or express their ignorance or skepticism through precise
questions. Teachers regard students and parents as clients or consumers who
demand value for money. And that value, sadly, is high grades.
Rote learning has
crowded out space for fostering curiosity, discovery and collaborative
co-creation of knowledge. Students enter university without a capacity for
critical thinking and problem solving. They enter university as combatants,
ready to fight another battle for grades.
I longed to go to
university, in the illusion that professors were committed to nurturing an
intellectual culture and a life of the mind. But the self-importance and arrogance
of the professors was hugely disempowering. Most of my professors, just like my
primary and high school teachers, were imperious. Once a professor asked me why
I was not taking the notes he was dictating to the class. I looked up at him
and said that I was waiting for him say something that he had not copied from
the course textbook. He was unamused. Like
Shylock, in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, the professor demanded his pound
of flesh – his notes – in the end of semester examination.
A majority of students
graduating from Kenyan schools and colleges have a horrifying deficit in
complex reasoning, framing questions and problem solving. Moreover, our
education system leads us to believe that the best child or student or employee
or citizen is the one who does not question but parrots back “widely accepted
or politically correct feedback”. Our graduates lack the Knowledge, skills and attitudes
to fill and create jobs in the new globalized knowledge based economy. As young
citizens, they lack a sense of community, civic duty and public ethics.
Our curricular
and pedagogical practices offer uncanny insights into the Kenyan character, and
especially our disdain for debate, lack of respect for others and impunity. How
we are educated explains our winner take-it-all attitude and the belief that
our competitors are enemies to be vanquished and humiliated. It explains the
pettiness of our politics and the zero-sum ethnic calculus underlies the
contemptible ethnic divisions, which determine allocation of national
resources.
A democratic and prosperous society depends
on honest, if discomfiting debate. Fleeing from our inconvenient history under
the cowardly guise of “moving on” in the interest of peace and development is
like noticing a bottomless crater in your backyard and covering it with a fig
leaf, hoping that your children will not disappear into it.
A culture of debate and constructive
questioning is vital to building a democratic and inclusive society. Our
liberty does not depend on the largesse of political leaders and appointed acolytes.
It is inherent in constitutional rights and obligations bestowed on a vigilant
citizenry who question and speak truth to power. How we educate our children is
critical to preserving our liberty, fostering prosperity and equality.
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