Our education system is crumbling while we engage in useless debates

Our education system has been crumbling before our eyes. The education sector continues to lose focus and lacks a relevant ideological anchor.

We seem always to be in a spin with no serious leadership at the top on education matters. Within civil society, we have a paucity of organisations whose activism focuses on education.

Meantime, our investment in education at individual and national levels keeps skyrocketing. My student, Elizabeth Njeri, raised the question in class: how come Kenyans, especially the poor ones among us, will invest their last remaining cent in education and not anywhere else?

I would add, how come that they make this investment but don’t want to have a relevant policy debate about the future of our education? Instead, we engage in useless debates that side-track us from dealing with our educational challenges for the sake of our children. One such debate refers to a distinction between public and private schools.

The reality is that public or private schools ought to be united in their aim to secure high quality and relevant education. At the core of any education system, whether public or private, must be a focus on access, equity, quality and relevance.

Unfortunately, most Kenyans prefer endless debates about public versus private schools. The debate involves, on the one hand, those who support the populist attempt by government to safeguard graduates of public primary school by rewarding them with easier access to secondary schools.

QUALITY PREREQUISITES

In so doing, they sacrifice equity in access to secondary school. On the other hand are those who insist that private primary school graduates deserve equal access to secondary school. This group ignores the comparative advantages private schools enjoy.

They also ignore not only the equity concern but also the quality prerequisites of any sustainable education system.

None in these categories seems to see that the ministry of Education is engaged in a populist dodging of its core mandate of ensuring equitable access to quality and relevant education. Whether you are a cheerleader for private or public schools, you cannot wish away a few facts.

First, private schools are a reality of our education system. They will not disappear away anytime soon. Second, these schools are not purely the product of profiteers; they are above everything else the consequence of a demand for schools that our government has failed to meet.

FILL THE GAP

Three, even as government is unable to provide enough public schools, the few that are available are inadequately staffed and their infrastructure has worsened as demand has risen. As such, above the profit motive, private schools fill a gap and serve a purpose that our government has failed to fill.

Five, the main problem with private schools is that they are peddlers of rote learning. Six, and contrary to popular assumptions, not all private schools are the same; we have high class ones and extremely low class ones with bad infrastructure and poor remuneration for teachers.

Instead of engaging in endless debates, we ought to unite in the worthy fight for equity or proportionate access, quality and relevant education. We surely must be aware that our education promotes that mute memorisation of things, most of which lack any connection and relevance to our everyday lived realities. Quality education demands the development of the critical faculties of pupils, allowing them to unleash their full potential as thinkers, creators and innovators. It enables learners to question rather than simply agree. It provokes them to pry into the many-sidedness of reality rather than to conform to the dictates of a single monotonous reality. There is no creativity in rote learning, there is simply aping and repeating what the teacher says.

Godwin Murunga is Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi. [email protected]