The reason we need the new school curriculum to include value learning

Last weekend, we launched the Kenya Values Trust. The Trust focuses on the education sector and seeks to mobilise Kenyans to accept a values-based learning system.

Perhaps President Uhuru Kenyatta does not remember this, but in Facing Mount Kenya, Mzee argued that, among the Agikuyu, learning began with birth and ended with death.

Mwalimu Julius Nyerere then appropriately added that such learning was by living and doing.

The idea of a Trust on values-based learning has not received the traction it deserves. Its chief proponent, Mrs Priscilla Were, therefore comes through as shouting in the wilderness. Yet, she has committed her life to developing the full potential of learners through a system of schooling that has produced results.

Right from Butere Girls High School in the 1970s, through to Bunyore Girls and later Lugulu Girls, the impact of her experience as an educator has been visible.

Sitting with Mrs Were at the launch of the Trust and listening to the students from Glory Values School, I could not but be sobered by the values the students live and what long-term advantage they will reap simply by passing through such a capable educator. Check this: the school has eliminated theft but has no school prefect.

Students and teachers at Glory Values School live values; this is almost akin to the idea of learning being by living and doing. Students know what they want to be when they graduate and are diligently working towards their goals.

In other words, the values they are learning and living are not confined to the school compound, only practiced during school sessions. They are lifelong commitments and are practiced throughout. Some parents confirm the impact such learning has on students.

Mwalimu Nyerere wrote critically about schools separated from society by a school compound. In Education for Self-Reliance, he demonstrates his vision for an education system that is relevant to society.

CAST OUT BY SANCTIONS

He wanted an education system in which the learner is organically linked to society. Many of us wonder why Cuba is a successful system even though it has suffered the horror of being cast out by sanctions for decades. It is because the country sorted out its value system and identified the education system as the engine of nurturing those values.

Too many Kenyans are disappointed and angry at their political system. Though we have a progressive constitution that identifies leadership values and argues for their centrality to our nationhood, those values are ignored with impunity.

So, while South Africa can conduct an election and the results are amicably announced by an electoral commission empowered to enjoy full autonomy, in Kenya, we are unable to get someone at the electoral commission who can stand by what is right and discipline political actors to respect the rules of the game.

If we have to explain why we are forever trapped in this vicious cycle, we must avoid two main mistakes. First, we must not imagine that the solution will be easy, quick and immediate. Let’s be clear, we have taken decades to get to the unacceptable end where our children burn school property with impunity.

Our political system has nurtured us to understand that leaders concede to popular demands only when we burn, destroy, maim and kill.

We also know that people who laugh at the noise columnists make in meat wrapping papers dominate our political class. We, therefore, must be patient in thinking through and arriving at long-term solutions against numerous odds.

Second, instead of focusing on the political class, we should go back to our schools and our school curriculum and see how to reboot the thinking and expectations of learners. This is where values-based education will help.

The issue is not that values-based learning is unworkable or impractical, it is that we are ignoring what has been tried and tested at Glory Values School.

Godwin R. Murunga is a senior research fellow in the Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi