We may have finally got it right on new education system, but...

Every country on earth is in search of a better education system for their youth. You are never satisfied with what you have and the blackboards are always blacker on the other side of the academic fence. The Chinese system, which churns out hundreds of thousands science graduates every year, now complains that those graduates do not have imagination. They are just number-crunching automatons.
The American system complains that its graduates lack a more rigorous grounding in science. The British... well, let us insert a pause to laugh at our former colonial masters because it never gets old... have an education system that has an exam (GCSE) that had a 98 per cent pass rate in 2010. Twenty five per cent of students who sat the exam got an A. The only exam that should have a 98 per cent pass rate is the Hell Entrance Exam for charismatic churches’ clergy. Anywhere else and is a joke.
Intelligence is normally distributed, so a good exam system should have a pass rate of about 50 per cent. Or rather, 68 per cent of all students should have between 65 per cent and 35 per cent of the marks available if an exam is a reliable measure of intelligence.
Tony Blair came to power with the mantra “education, education, education”, but his constant meddling, tweaking of the system and obsession with performance rankings has led the country to the inexorable path of decline.
I haven’t as yet finished my allotted time in the 8-4-4s, but during that time the system has been changed thrice. Now they propose changing it for a fourth time. 8-4-4 seems like a system under constant evolution — constantly tinkered with, modified and fiddled with.
They first booted out Art and Crafts, Music and Home Science while I was in primary. This reduced the number of exams we put our children through from seven to five and put KCPE out of 500 marks.
Then they created something called Social Studies when I had just entered high school, which was a bit like GHC (Geography, History and Civics) but perhaps more local. Then they dropped Social Ethics and moved the topics in Mathematics around. Oh, and they also split the mole concept in Chemistry into two — in Forms III and IV — and made a whole lot of changes to the History curriculum while I was in secondary.
They were still tinkering with a system that had lost favour instead of pulling the plug. It was sort of like watching a mortician do his job on a body entering rigor mortis, trying to make it look its best before putting it in the compost because there is no point sending it to City Mortuary since their cooling system is on ice.
It must be great being a book publisher in such uncertain times. Presses are always rumbling with reprints, ready to take advantage of any small change in the system. It is a veritable gold mine as parents, eager to give their children every single advantage, will buy all the books proposed; especially if your book gets the hallowed mark of quality and acceptance that is the “Approved by the Ministry of Education” sign. Then you have a license to print money. You have a national bestseller in your hands.
The changes proposed in the new system are even more far reaching; the ones proposed before were, more or less, in my un-esteemed opinion, a state-sponsored bung to the ailing publishing sector.
For starters, the system sets out to reduce the number of years in school by one, from (2)-8-4-4 to 2-6-3-3-3. I’m glad they acknowledge the first two years now, because the 8-4-4 system always seemed a bit contemptuous of early childhood education.
Especially commendable will be the insistence that lecturers are trained on how to teach. Teaching is about communication, but some lecturers get the position only because of their knowledge in their specialised fields yet they are horrible at passing on ideas (although, I should hastily add, none of the lecturers who currently teach me are anything but exemplary).
However, implementing the system is fraught with pitfalls. For starters, the government will need time to implement pilot schools preceding a nationwide roll out. The decision to slate the changes for 2013 are ambitious, perhaps too ambitious. The government should get time to try out the system in a school or schools throughout the country (I vote for the project to start at Nyakimencha Primary) to fine-tune the system and see pitfalls that may arise from its implementation.
I believe the number of years in school doesn’t ultimately matter; it is the curriculum that we should worry about. I hope that, above all, we can prepare our children more for the world outside learning institutions. We should begin at the earliest instance to teach them how to program computers since the world outside is becoming more and more reliant on processors.
I also think that it will impact the initiative negatively if it is fronted by politicians instead of experts in the education field. This will prevent the system from being considered a political project of an elite few with an eye for milking the system for political mileage.
Also worrying was a piece on this paper’s opinion pages by a Professor Amutabi over the taskforce’s collective dearth of qualification in the education team appointed by Sam Ongeri. Perhaps that was because the 8-4-4 system, which is now acknowledged as a disaster, was crafted by educational experts led by Canadian professor Collins Mackay, so the good minister decided to choose persons not actively involved in the educational sector to get a good education system. You can’t beat such didactic reasoning.
We need more Kenyans involved in the coming days on the situation. All those with views on the matter should bring them forward. However, I don’t think cost should be a factor because, if we get it right, we could end up with an education system that actively contributes to our GDP and makes Kenyans even more globally competitive.

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