Kenya's education system needs significant improvement

Fred Matiang'i, the Cabinet Secretary for the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, at Safari Park Hotel and Casino in Nairobi on September 9, 2016. PHOTO | ANTHONY OMUYA | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Indiscipline is a factor of student behaviour.

  • But I am not sure how folk can complain of this when I see schools blatantly ignoring government edicts.

Please, excuse a mzungu expressing his opinion of the Kenyan education sector. But, having been closely involved with it over the past 16 years, I think that gives me some right to express my particular insight.

Let me introduce myself: I, along with two Kenyans, work with street children or orphans. I also express my comments as a father of four girls, all grown-up and who all achieved first and second degrees and include a medical doctor and a lawyer, but none having been subjected to the torturous demands upon students seen in Kenya.

Teachers and students are faced with an almost impossible curriculum, and students extremely long hours in class over six days, or even seven, and that’s just at primary and secondary day level. There’s also the prison-like conditions and regimes of boarding schools (actually, this is perhaps an insult to prisons).

I recall in 2000 taking a youngster for admission to Form One at a boarding school in Oyugis and being shocked by the conditions there: dormitories jam-packed with double-decker beds almost adjoining each other with little space for personal possessions; the average school day starting at 4am and continuing to 10.30pm, with only short breaks for meals and cleaning.

Then, I just thought this is total nonsense: how on earth can the youngsters stay awake in class, and surely, a growing teenager should not suffer sleep deprivation.

TRIPLE-DECKER BEDS

Sadly, over the years, I have not seen any improvement to the above but rather the reverse: triple-decker beds in dorms and more youngsters crowded into schools with inadequate facilities to cater for the high numbers. And still with the long school days, even longer if in Form Four, and now threatened with even less time at home.

I ask myself, is it any wonder that students rebel and set fire to dorms, though I hasten to add that I’m not justifying such a response of violence?

One of our older youngsters, now a father of three, who lives in one of the "slum" areas of Kisumu, hardly able to pay rent, buy shoes for his children or pay tuition fees, being told to provide Sh3,000 for a gown and mortar board for his child’s graduation ceremony. Not only was this inconceivable for him given how little money he had but it was also absurd, given that his children were only in upper nursery!

Frequently, children at primary schools are sent home for lack of shoes, their hair being too long.... Thankfully, the principal of a primary school where we placed five youngsters said he would rather have children go to school in slippers than not attending because the parent/guardian could not afford the cost of shoes. Sadly, I think far too few school administrations take such an enlightened attitude.

CANING INJURIES

Over the years, I have photographed and taken for medical examination youngsters with caning injuries resulting in large welts to the back, neck and legs. Those saying corporal punishment should be reintroduced in schools as the solution to the current arson attacks should, perhaps, come to Nyanza, where I’m not aware it ever stopped. Could such brutalisation be a root cause of riots?

Indiscipline is a factor of student behaviour. But I am not sure how folk can complain of this when I see schools blatantly ignoring government edicts – for instance, the ban on holiday tuition and the accompanying fees.

It would appear that many school heads and boards are a total law unto themselves. Extra fees are frequently demanded as an outcome of a PTA meeting that has voted for additional pesa for this or that. The amount demanded at one boarding school, where we had several youngsters, totalled Sh35,000 in one year – where were we, a charity, to suddenly find it?

Kenya's education system needs significant improvement, maybe a requirement for administrators to have a degree in common sense!

 

Terence Newton works in Kenya with a non-governmental organisation dealing with orphans, especially street children.