Where, as a country, are we looking for heroes and heroines of our time?

My parents are retired teachers. As a family, we have interesting memories about school and schooling.

My father, Arnold Murunga, rose through the ranks and retired as an Assistant Education Officer.

My mother, Rita Murunga, taught lower primary all her life. She often talks about those “‘big” people who owe their success to the discipline she introduced and nurtured.

Last weekend, some of these memories came back as we congregated at Kabarak High School for prayer day to wish our children success in their final examination.

I have been working together with the class teacher, Mrs Gertrude Siita, and some parents to motivate Form 4E to perform better and they now have our best wishes.

Of course, I am always struck when I visit Kabarak or Booker Academy in Mumias how empowered students are.

Students play a significant role not just in their academic work but in many other areas of personal and collective growth.

This is unlike other schools that tend to restrict the role of students to entertainment and rote learning.

GREATER ACCESS

Indeed, our national habits on education don’t help much as they pay only lip-service to developing all-round students; students whose creativity is useful beyond mute compliance and entertaining visitors.

My wish, therefore, has always been that more Kenyan children access what other children get from private schools.

I am critical of the elitism fostered by our institutions of learning.

I hope this will one day be mediated by the values of integrity, honesty and respect for diversity; values that inculcate different leadership habits from what our politicians practise.

Any such development would deal with a big challenge in our school system that instils an elite aspiration in our children, giving them a form of education that they deserve but which is out of reach for the majority of Kenyans and out of touch with the reality of our collective existence.

SCHOOL VALUES

Thus, hearing of Butere High School this past week was a humbling experience indeed.

This is a private school in Butere, formerly Butere Patel. It has 150 students and 16 teachers. At the helm is the Director, Mrs Priscilla Were; a familiar name in Kenya’s education story.

Mrs Were is a role model, a pioneer of a different form of school in Kenya. She runs a school that is led by school values not school rules.

The school does not have prefects yet the girls know how to solve their problems collectively.

Girls have deep respect for one another and their diversity, and have collective solutions to problems.

So, they set up a Samaritan Bank where students deposit extra-shopping to be used by those not able to afford it.

This has eliminated petty theft in the school and created prudent use of shared items.

Talking to alumni of Bunyore Girls High School where Mrs Were was headmistress from 1975 to 1992, one encounters a leader of rare skill and tenacity, a woman whose personal agenda is changing Kenya, one girl at a time!

She leads by example; students walk into her office to remind her of what she has failed to do. Here, they invert the notion of leadership common to us.

INFUELNCE IS EXCHANGED

The director is not the all-knowing ogre of knowledge. So, rather than simply issuing orders, at Butere High School, influence is exchanged as students also exercise leadership.

I heard of Mrs Were back in high school when Bunyore Girls was the envy of Western Kenya.

Within three years of assuming leadership of Bunyore, she moved the school from oblivion to the top 10 nationally.

At Butere, she has moved the school from a mean score of 2.1 in 2009 to a new average of 7.4 in the 2014 mock examination— putting the school at position five in Kakamega County out of more than 300 schools.

Surely, where are we looking for our heroes?

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