The quest for ‘elite education’ is ruining our country

We must have different social classes interacting in our schools and colleges.

What you need to know:

  • Life’s irony: Products from this system are good at what they do but have no idea why they are doing it.
  • We must have different social classes interacting in our schools and colleges.

A friend was recently moving his children from a Montessori kindergarten to join elementary school in Nairobi.

He agonised over the choices available: Enrol the children in a public school offering the 8-4-4 system or take them to a private IGCE school.

As a proud alumnus of the 8-4-4, he believes the much maligned system nurtures peerless critical life skills: Self-reliance, personal responsibility, creativity and industriousness alongside the rigours of its academic syllabi.

But his head was being turned by friends — part of the cappuccino-sipping metropolitan elite, his neighbours in Nairobi’s leafy suburbia, and heads of various blue-chip companies he interacts with in the city.

They warned him that he would be doing his children a great disservice taking them to a public school.

A good school today, they said, is not just about ensuring your child gets an education; no, it is about networking for the future, it is about social power and prestige.

Fire, they said, would beget ash if he went the public school way.

The system that rules and owns Kenya reproduces itself, they warned.

“Your children will be meeting the sons and daughters of those who rule this country and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future,” words that haunted him as he tried to seek our counsel.

These views appeared arrogant yet bizarrely appropriate in underlining the scale of an emerging frightening reality.

PAYING OVER THE ODDS

We are witnessing the rampant corporatisation and privatisation of education in Kenya — from elementary school to university. It is a trend begging for critical debate.

Parents are paying over the odds to take their children to private schools and to “academies”, some no more than successful businesses exploiting this new quest for the emergent ethos in schooling — networking.

Meanwhile, the children of Kenya’s elite are going to school together, knowing no other than their type.

We are witnessing the emergence of a generation whose experience of the other Kenya starts and ends on television.

But Kenya is only catching up with what’s going on elsewhere.

In a recent intriguing article in the New Republic, William Dereciawizc scorns at the growing obsession with elite education in America.

Referring to what has become of American upper middle class clamour for elite education for their children, he complains that: “Elite education now manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: Trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.”

It is a world of intellectual nothingness, an environment in which no life skills in the “real” world outside the bubble are found relevant.

Personal responsibility in that bubble means you don’t carry your bag or books back home from school. It is an enchanting world of exciting extra-curricular activities — ballet, tennis, swimming, piano and others.

The ethos is to extol the virtues of “presentation and networking”.

RULING CLASS

More worryingly, elite education is now being designed to create a ruling class literally removed from “normal” human experience.

It is for this reason that we must begin to ask these questions: How can people who share everything in common think differently? How much do these children understand the world’s problems — poverty, disease, climate change — when they are neither affected by it nor do they socialise with people who experience it firsthand?

Today, it would be shocking if children in any of these elite schools were encouraged to pursue a career in social work.

Quite often the only measure of success is unambiguously financial and political. Accordingly, careers are limited to banking, law, medicine and similar careers.

Yes, we need all these but we also need bankers who’ve never owned a dime. We need lawyers, but let’s also have those who know what it means to go to bed hungry.

Or doctors who have experienced the suffering that begets one who has consumed untreated water because that’s all they have access to.

It is a parent’s right to give the best possible start and opportunity to their children.

But it is also the State’s responsibility to ensure those children and their parents are not put off from taking their children to public schools because they are under-resourced and poorly staffed.

We have political leaders who often don’t care about public school education because they can afford to take their children to the elite international private schools and overseas universities.

Sadly, the nature of our political system is such that in time, it is the elite’s children who will be our Cabinet secretaries for Education.

They will know about the history of the Thames River and not River Nzoia. As a result, they will wonder why children in the River Nzoia catchment don’t go to school in the rainy season. That is the frightening future we are nurturing.

SILENT FAULT LINE

By all means let us have these private schools and academies, but let us also have strong, well resourced public schools and public education.

How can we content with a situation where in the corridors of both visible and invisible power, everywhere you turn, chums from our private schools, academies and international schools will be speaking a language only they understand.

Collectively, we must also work towards re-orienting the character of what we mean by education.

We must have different social classes interacting in our schools and colleges. As our economy enters a new dawn, our silent fault line will be class, not tribe. It probably is already.

The fact that no one talks about it makes it a powerful insidious enemy within.

Let us all reflect on what Dereciawicz says of the US: “I used to think that we needed to create a world where every child had an equal chance to get to the Ivy League. I’ve come to see that what we really need is to create one where you don’t have to go to the Ivy League, or any private college, to get a first-rate education.”

We doubt there would be a more fitting parallel for our Kenyan policy makers.

Dr Ogola teaches at the University of Central Lancashire, UK. [email protected]; Mr Okello is a public affairs expert with a Nairobi-based multinational [email protected]. The views expressed here are personal