To end school unrest, ministry must find out what students want and are denied

What you need to know:

  • The government must find out what the students want and are denied them, forcing them to use arson as protest.
  • School authorities need an inclusive and collaborative system with an in-built advance warning mechanism to nip strike action in the bud.
  • You don’t want schools joining public protests, do you?

According to official count, by July 18, some 68 secondary schools across Kenya had suffered arson by students since the beginning of the year. As I filed this piece, my arithmetic put the figure beyond 70. However, according to the Ministry of Education, by this time last year, 98 schools had been set on fire by students.

Therefore, says the ministry, the scale of arson attacks on schools by students is this year significantly lower than it was last year. Elizabeth Cooper, in her scholarly 2014 article titled "Students, Arson, and Protest Politics in Kenya: School  Fires or Political Action", reports that there were 14, 28 and 34 cases of arson in schools, plus several cases of thwarted attempts at arson were reported in 2011, 2012 and 2013 respectively.

Last, in 2008 the report of the parliamentary Departmental Committee on Education, Research and Technology on the Inquiry into Students’ Unrest and Strikes, recorded that a whopping 290 secondary schools had gone on strike as at the start of September. And, 50 per cent of these strikes, the team chaired by Mr David Kibet Koech said, had been violent and destructive.

In a word, these figures are staggering. Why are we here?

Several independent studies show the main causes of unrest in secondary schools to include, but not limited to, poor or incompetent administration; external interference in the recruitment and or transfers of school heads and teachers; blame games between heads and teachers on one hand and local communities on the other, especially over performance in national examinations; poor or inadequate communication between administrators and students; unrealistic or oppressive rules; corporal punishment; poor relationship between teaching staff and students; differences and or hostility between school heads and their deputies; tyrannical prefects; food; peer and examination pressures; parents who do not care about the attitude or discipline of their children; and a ministry that imposes rules without consultation.

These factors suggest to me that a school is neither an island nor an ivory tower. The communities in which schools are situated; the administrative, teaching and student communities; the parents; and the ministry bear a collective responsibility to ensure those enclaves are run well.

REGULAR CONTACT

The best way to link and keep all these groups abreast of what is happening around them is regular contact, sharing of information and cultivation of joint ownership of, and belonging to, the schools and to each other. This, I appreciate, is easier said than done, but not impossible. Here’s why it must be done.

Students in a Kericho school in January managed to drain eight gigantic tanks of water and, therefore, rendered putting out the fire that they lit impossible. Not a single teacher, prefect, or watchman even got wind of the planning let alone execution of it. That points to a huge gap in terms of contact and flow of information between the school’s communities.

If the foregoing proposal is tough, how about this prospect? In 2008, when Kenya was hit by widespread arson, commentators advanced the view that the children were copying the adults who had burnt and killed, maimed and looted during the mayhem that greeted the results of the December 27 presidential poll. Last month, the violence in schools was blamed on children copying the violent and teargas-filled picketing by MPs against the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission. Is arson in Kenya’s schools directly linked to the goings-on in the political arena? Yes. Listen to Cooper: “School-based arson is indicative of more than the contested conditions of education ... The use of arson by students reflects what this generation has learned about how protest and politics work. Students’ recognition that destructive actions are efficacious in winning a response from authorities highlights that learning and feeds a reactionary mode of governance in which citizens’ initiatives tend to be neglected until they pose direct threats to public peace and financing.”

Indeed, students at a Naivasha school stunned Mr Koech and company when they told them that they had learned from demonstrating MPs that agitation pays.

So the ministry must find out what the students want and are denied them, forcing them to use arson as protest.

Second, school authorities need an inclusive and collaborative system with an in-built advance warning mechanism to nip strike action in the bud.

Last, you don’t want schools joining public protests, do you?