Our education system is beholden
to high stakes standardized national examinations, which demands unthinking
regurgitation and diminishes critical thinking and analytical reasoning.
A majority of the students who
excel in the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) and Kenya
certificate of Secondary Education (KSCE) are skillful at what to think, not
how to think. This is consistent with the dominant colonial logic of producing
the ideal African minion, subservient to settler authority. Africans were to do
as told, not to think.
Our education system does best
what it is designed to do; produce huge numbers of unsophisticated literate
citizens. However, what continues to baffle me is that the colonial desire to
produce an unthinking, subservient underclass was not any different from what
the African elite, the heirs to the colonists, imagined of the post-colonial
society. Successive governments have demanded unquestioning allegiance, total
dependence on the benevolence of the state and mindless convergence around a
flawed vision of society as authored by the political class. This explains why
this rather problematic way we educate our children has been very durable.
I have argued in this column many
times that the high stakes national exams is based on a curriculum and approach
of pedagogy that demands nothing of the capacity of our children to think or imagine
or play or reason or create or innovate. From the first day they show up in
school thinking is outlawed; our children are taught to accept everything,
without question, on the authority of the teacher and the content of the
curriculum.
Our schools have become grade
factories. Tyrannized by parents and school head teachers who demand high mean
grades, teachers have little time to stimulate and engage the boundless
capacity of children to play, wonder and co-create knowledge.
The high stakes standardized
national examinations have also served another purpose; a basis for allocating
scarce resources of secondary and tertiary education. It is shameful that a
majority of the best-resourced schools are the so-called national schools that
were built by the colonial administration. It is unconscionable that over half
a century after independence, our children still do not have equitable access
to high quality secondary schools.
I am heartened that the debate on
whether to abolish or keep high stakes national examinations is back on the
table. In my view we must abolish KCPE over the next 2 -5 years, and with it,
the colonial relic of elite national schools. We must level the playing field
in education, ramp up investments in education and empower counties to manage
education resources. The national government and the county governments must
work out a model of conditional transfer of education grants, based on
enrollment, retention, completion and student achievement. Moreover, we must
define minimum standards for our schools – physical facilities, teacher-student
ratio, and learning materials – that define a school anywhere in the republic
of Kenya.
We teach our children too much
stuff at the expense of developing critical capacity in key areas of knowledge,
skills and attitudes. It is time to pare down the primary school curriculum and
scrap KCPE. We must define a small set of core competences in reading, writing,
math, teamwork, critical thinking and analytical reasoning, against which
teachers, parents and students are held accountable to. Transition from primary
to high school should be based on progressive, multiple and dynamic assessments
on achievement on the core competences done at the school level, by students
and teachers, and not a national examining body.
In a competitive globalized knowledge
economy, a high school education must be the birthright of every Kenyan child.
Every child must be guaranteed the inalienable right to high quality education
in any school, public or private. We must define basic education as 12 years of
school, from grade 1 to grade 12, in addition to pre-school years. Transition
to high school must not be based on meaningless high stakes exams. Such a
system only serves to exacerbate inequality and undermines shared economic
progress.
Half a century of an education
system that stifles thinking is enough. It is time to end the exam-centric
system of education, which undervalues critical thinking, analytical reasoning,
and knowledge application, but privileges mindless regurgitation of undigested
facts.
Kenya needs not unthinking
technicians and minions. To be relevant and competitive in the 21st
century, Kenya needs to nurture a new generation of thoughtful, creative and
innovative knowledge workers.
No comments:
Post a Comment