Kenya’s education system at a crossroads

Students at Watuka Boys High School in Nyeri County assess the damage to their property after a dormitory was burned down on July 26, 2016. PHOTO | JOSEPH KANYI | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • An ideological battle began in the late seventies and peaked in the eighties, but has continued to simmer with every new education policy.
  • We have the puritans whose idea of an education system is one that prepares young people for increasingly complex tasks at each educational milestone, from social interactions in kindergarten to highly specialised training in research institutions.
  • Those accepted in the traditional ivory towers of academia would then be given all the resources they need to generate new knowledge and disseminate it to policy makers and industry in order to support national goals and visions.

Kenya is currently going through a crisis in the education sector and, in attempting to resolve it, we are ignoring lessons from other countries that had to learn from experience.

The crisis is not about school burnings and shorter holidays, though. I would argue it is an ideological battle that began in the late seventies and peaked in the eighties, but has continued to simmer with every new education policy.

While educational philosophers will obviously chime in with their views on what exactly the conflict entails, I would like to posit that it is a struggle over the control of the entire educational system, and hence the nation-building enterprise.

On the one hand, we have the puritans whose idea of an education system is one that prepares young people for increasingly complex tasks at each educational milestone, from social interactions in kindergarten to highly specialised training in research institutions.

In their view, there is a role for those that exit the system at each stage, from repetitious menial tasks at the lower levels to jobs requiring huge amounts of brainpower at the top end of the system.

They would therefore design a system that ensures universal access to the basic education necessary to interact with others constructively, while restricting access to the higher echelons to only the brightest and most motivated.

Those accepted in the traditional ivory towers of academia would then be given all the resources they need to generate new knowledge and disseminate it to policy makers and industry in order to support national goals and visions.

Several criticisms can be levelled against the puritans, including the fact that their position is antithetical to the modern view that all persons should be helped to achieve their full potential, rather than being judged on their perceived failures. Critics will aver that with the right environment and assistance, even the person accepted as the village lout can become a highly skilled engineer.

IRRATIONAL EXPANSION

Ranked against the puritans are those that would “democratise” access to education, by attempting to ensure the highest level of training is available to every citizen, and the only limitation to this access would be personal choice.

These are the advocates of having a university in every village, regardless of the nature of programmes offered at the institution or the calibre of those employed to teach. They are the reason some universities engaged in irrational expansion of campuses until some would-be puritans at the Commission for University Education felt they had to intervene.

The “democratisers” won an accidental victory against the puritans in the early eighties when the Kanu kleptocracy identified the academy as the biggest threat to dictatorship and shipped them off into detention or forced them into exile.

The remaining Kanu “intellectuals” designed a system of education based on “locally available resources”, meaning they focused more on practical artisanal skills than on higher-level thinking that would produce graduates fit for today’s knowledge economy.

One senses the need to conclusively address this ideological war. I would propose a system that recognises both the need for local relevance and the global “flat world” realities.

We must indeed expand access to primary and secondary education so that all are able to engage usefully with their environment, but we must also maintain higher-level specialised training institutions in which we produce the manpower that will drive our economy towards global competitiveness.

We must learn from those that have tried either the puritan approach or educational “democratisation” and design a system that benefits from both.

To this end, we would reap inestimable dividends from refining the curriculum right from upper primary school to the university to slant it steeply towards acquisition of critical thinking skills and long-term planning.

Atwoli is associate professor of psychiatry and dean, School of Medicine, Moi University; [email protected]