“Exams are a necessary evil”. These words were proclaimed by my high
school headmaster annually, to calm terrified and nervous candidates. Back
then, these words were incredibly sagacious. Today they sound hollow; a
shameful acceptance of a failed education system.
A high-stakes exam-centric education has turned schools into grade
factories. Our school buildings, in my view are mausoleums, housing the remains
of education. We have murdered the soul of education and defiled the creative
proclivity of our children.
The word education is derived from the Greek word educatio, which
means bringing up, or raise. Education is about knowledge, skills, values,
beliefs, and habits through story telling, debate, learning, training and or
research.
The so-called education is delivered through passive 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.
Rote learning and didactic teaching is a linear product-oriented
approach. The output is measured by achievement in standardized test scores. This
grade oriented system is characterized by the absence of independent thinking
and an abundance of subservience and a follow the leader mindset.
Sadly, what happens in our schools is not education. Our schools
are obsessed with examination grades. Parents demand high grades. Teachers crave
high subject mean grades and headteachers want prestige to drive high
enrollment and revenue. Parents and teachers want high grades from students by
hook or by crook.
Evidence and examples abound, which demonstrate how the product-oriented
education was used by the colonial government to institutionalize rote learning
and unquestioning acceptance of facts, discouraging, critical thinking and
perpetrating cultural and intellectual subjugation. Half a century after colonialism,
the product-oriented, exam-centric education system is still alive. Clearly,
the colonialist is no longer here. Whose interest is served by unthinking
citizens?
How we are educated offers unsettling insights into the archetypal Kenyan,
especially our unquestioning allegiance to ethnic head honchos, impunity and disdain
for analytical reasoning and robust public debate. How we are educated explains
our winner take-it-all attitude and the belief that our competitors are enemies
to be humiliated. It explains the primordial and contemptible zero-sum ethnic
calculus of our politics.
The didactic, fact-based and exam-centric approach to education has its
origins in the era of scarcity of facts and information. Books and other
learning resources were rare, the Internet was not even imaginable.Today we are
inundated with information and facts. Facts and information are a click away,
on our mobile phones, tablets and computers. You do not need school or college
to memorize facts or get information.
We must re-appropriate education to optimize curiosity, creativity and innovation.
Our schools must foster playful exploration and emancipate education from rote
learning and the tyranny of a didactic, fact-based and exam-centric approach. Education
must be a recursive process of learning, sense-making, collaboration,
application, discovery and re-learning.
Primary education must be the first rung on the ladder, where we learn
how learn, to learn how to think, to learn how to ask questions, to learn how
to play, how collaborate and to learn how to be moral, ethical citizens.
Moreover, primary education must not be about how to take a meaningless test,
which do not challenge their wonderful creative and inventive minds. It is time
to abolish KCPE.
Vision
Transition to high school must be a birthright of every Kenyan child. We
must abandon the colonial logic of artificial scarcity of high school education
resources. Moreover, the colonialists wanted to create a small cadre of pliable
and subservient educated elite, for obvious reasons.
A radical change in Kenya’s education is imperative, if we are to build
a stable democracy and prepare skilled and employable citizens to drive the
political, socio-economic and technological transformation imagined in Vision
2030.
I offer some ideas to motivate debate: i) replace current fact-laden
curriculum with a problem-based approach to learning to encourage critical
thinking, analytical reasoning, collaboration, innovation and discovery; ii)
eliminate standardized national testing for primary school; iii) assess
learning through multiple measures, including school-based formative
assessments and student portfolios; iv) promote knowledge application and
reflective practice at all levels through service learning because “tell me and
I will forget, show me and I will remember and involve me and I will
understand”.
Half a century later, do we have the courage to reform our education
system, emancipate our children and secure the future for posterity?
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