Kenya wastes its potential by ignoring late bloomers
What you need to know:
- You could have been Mozart or Monet or both but our education system, and the society produced by it, simply didn’t care.
- Our universities reward coordinators, chairs, heads of departments, deans, principals, and higher positions as opposed to the exemplary lecturer or researcher.
- The Council of Legal Education (CLE) came up with 10 points of reference, which in my view were done without thought of our circumstances.
- Toilets are few and far between, are often locked and with no toilet paper. No one talks about the students-toilet ratio.
Recently I saw roses coming into bloom. Although all the rose buds were from the same plant, each rose bloomed in its own time.
Each bud, regardless of time, produced a rose, which, by any other name, was still a rose. I thought this was analogous to life, particularly along our educational journey.
Academically, we each bloom at our own time, and this is increasingly supported by new thinking on educational systems. Yet the educational system that Kenya inherited from the colonialists did not recognise late bloomers.
If you did not excel in national exams, or in three-hour, end-of-semester college exams, you were regarded with slightly more respect than a moron.
It didn’t matter what else you were good at. You could have been Mozart or Monet or both but our education system, and the society produced by it, simply didn’t care.
Ken Robinson would classify our education system as one that does not nurture creativity.
In many ways, our educational system has not changed since its inception. All children must start school at age six, irrespective of the stage they are at towards blooming intellectually.
Soon after age 13, they are assessed for just a few days for what they can remember from all that they have been taught for the last eight years. The same ritual is repeated when the child is 18 years.
There are no provisions for unfortunate occurrences during exams. Nobody cares to consider the impact of the inevitable high stress on some bright candidates during the short exam season.
Woe unto you if you are ill. It is a cattle-dip system and everyone must jump in, ready or not, able or not.
Society then uses the outcomes from these assessments to decide who is smart and who is not. The label you are assigned stays with you for the rest of your life.
Many young people have talents that may never be discovered because we have never developed mechanisms to identify and develop those talents. A few athletes have succeeded, mostly by accident.
Some potential footballers rot in the villages, never to be discovered, as soccer administrators fight for positions. Great actors, painters, writers and storytellers are buried into oblivion because math failed them.
CONTINUOUS ASSESSMENT
We fight for women's rights without remedying the cause of their lifetime discrimination. Thousands of young girls in Kenya miss school four to five days every month because they cannot afford sanitary towels. As a result, they perform poorly at the end of their primary level assessment.
Research has shown that majority of these girls perform as well as, if not better than, boys in the years leading up to their first day of menstrual periods.
We can reverse this with one policy statement that would allow for continuous assessment, so that their earlier performance can boost the outcome of their final exams.
Our unforgiving society often classifies these young girls as poor performers only fit to be maids.
Similarly, thousands of teenagers miss classes due to lack of fees and in the end their performance is affected. These too are classified as poor performers not fit to pursue education.
In other words, they are penalised heavily for being poor.
In the recent past, much has been said about what ails our education sector. Many attribute poor performance at university to lower admission standards.
This is but an unfortunate hypothesis, based on a hunch and largely motivated by the view that traditional high-paying professions are being flooded by hordes of undeserving people.
Poor performance in our universities is a consequence of many factors, not least poor living conditions, awful instructional facilities, lack of self-control and personal discipline, and the debasement of academic leadership by administrative leadership.
Our universities reward coordinators, chairs, heads of departments, deans, principals, and higher positions as opposed to the exemplary lecturer or researcher. This creates cutthroat competition for those positions at the expense of academic leadership and excellence.
'SOME FOREIGN BROCHURE'
Therefore, no one today can point to one single cause of poor performance at our universities. The minimum entry level to university, C+, is actually sufficient to retrieve many late bloomers.
It is the minimum not just in Kenya, but in all of the Commonwealth. Indeed, a Kenyan C+ outperforms A and B students in foreign universities.
In the US, entry standards are even more liberal. If, for some reason, you don’t finish high school and decide to go back to college many years later, you are allowed to sit for the General Education Diploma (GED).
From there, you can launch your education career and go all the way to PhD. You are then respected for your resolve, persistence, and guile, not pilloried for your lack of high school grades.
The Council of Legal Education (CLE) in its attempt to develop an accreditation framework came up with 10 points of reference, which in my view were done without thought of our circumstances.
They were most likely cut out of some foreign brochure and pasted on our local regulatory framework. I think CLE has to sit down and develop a more realistic framework.
Their proposed teacher-student ratio of 1:15 is impractical given our circumstances, unless our aim is to make legal education more elitist than it already is.
Unlike some of the top universities in the world that are well-endowed with enviable finance and resources, a ratio of 1:15 is utopian in the developing world where universities are not well financed to cater for the youth bulge and general population explosion.
US state universities average about 1:18 students, yet they have enormous resources from both the public and private sectors.
More than 80 per cent of classes in developing countries’ universities have more 100 students. In Kenya, public universities average a ratio of 1:60.
This in my view is not a problem. It is a challenge we can overcome through technology.
OUR POINT OF STRENGTH
If we start dealing with the challenge using standards set by the Western world, we shall miss the point. Experts are thinking of a complete revolution supported by emerging technologies, and we must be first to exploit the opportunities that are emerging.
For example, the ubiquitous mobile platform that we were the first to exploit in mobile money has many other unexploited opportunities in education.
In today’s digital world, the number of volumes you have in the library does not count. What counts is access to affordable broadband that places the entire global legal library at your fingertips.
Further, the massive open online courses (MOOCS) can ensure that students are even better prepared for any lecture prior to attending class.
There are people earning legal degrees through e-learning. Some of the renowned lawyers in this country earned their degrees through distance learning – and some of those keep wining against classroom-trained lawyers.
It is embarrassing when CLE demands that universities buy volumes of physical books for libraries when virtually all the research can be conducted online and effort has been made to digitise local legal resources.
While the lawyers of the 1990s and earlier had to spend considerable sums buying ornate statute books, today’s lawyer simply needs a robust internet connection and a tablet.
What we should be talking about is provision of more local knowledge resources. Instead of buying old, uncontextualised law volumes from Britain, let us begin to document our own methods and contribute to the global demand for knowledge. There is wisdom in starting from our own point of strength.
My criticism of professional bodies and their accrediting practices does not mean all is well in our education system.
In my previous posts here, I have urged the universities to close down satellite campuses where they are not able to control quality.
NEW, UGLY BUILDINGS
It is true that in some of these campuses they have hired less than qualified tutors to teach. But more importantly, we need a revolution in our educational system right from the Primary to university.
The 2013 World Bank report on Service Delivery Indicators (SDI) report paints a grim picture of the happenings in our schools.
Close to 50 percent of the time, teachers in rural public schools are absent from the classroom. This compares unfavourably with private schools, where teachers are absent from the classroom 31 per cent of the time.
On an eight-hour daily teaching schedule, students in public receive an average of 2 hours 19 minutes of teaching, compared to 3 hours and 18 minutes in private schools.
The SDI report also says that less than 40 per cent of teachers have minimum knowledge in the subjects they teach.
The World Bank report that has caused a stir in higher education is not comprehensive. In my view, it does not identify the causes of failure.
The main cause of our failure is lack of management skills. Those who saw our national schools while under the management of the colonialists say what they see today is an embarrassment and disappointment.
We never kept the standards.
Some schools had golf courses for high school students and could often have four course meals. This is all history now.
Today what you see in these schools are goats and sheep in place of lawn mowers. The serene and conducive environment for learning does not exist anymore.
Similarly, some of the beautiful higher education campuses that existed a few years ago have been overwhelmed by new, ugly buildings. Many look like tawdry bar blocks or multi-storied milk sheds.
It's as if aesthetics were never meant for us.
SLUM-LIKE CIRCUMSTANCES
The many benchmarking trips we make abroad to top universities never translate to anything on the ground. Halls of residents are no longer tranquil places for relaxing after a good day in college.
As recent newspaper reports have shown, poor, deserving students have to bribe to get a room in noisy hostels where students cook their meagre meals and drunken, drugged goons intimidate others, as young girls are picked up in huge limousines by men twice their age.
Classrooms are unpainted and dusty, with broken chairs, and rarely have sockets. There is not a single smart classroom at a public university in Kenya.
Toilets are few and far between, are often locked and with no toilet paper. No one talks about the students-toilet ratio.
These are all pointers that we have failed in management. A good environment encourages learning by creating a conducive environment for it to occur.
No meaningful learning can take place in slum-like, even brothel-like, circumstances. We have to do better for our college students.
It is not true that poverty can deny us even the most basic necessities in higher education. If we can’t afford to maintain sit-on toilets, let’s have working Indian toilets with adequate water.
Outside of university are employers who love papers even if they are unrelated to aptitude or performance, further complicating the education system.
If students know that they just need a master’s degree to get a promotion, there will be no motivation to pursue learning with passion.
Promotion must be based on ability to perform, not papers. It would greatly help if employers desisted from focusing on paper qualification and began to consider ability and passion for the jobs they seek to fill.
Since independence, we have kept on falsely telling ourselves that we have capacity to manage our affairs. When shall we know that we are not doing well and seek great administrators from elsewhere in the world?
The US does this and that is why they lead the world in research output and innovative capability.
For now, we need to begin new, disruptive innovation to introduce self-based learning that enables learners to enjoy the process and arouses the greater curiosity becomes the basis of research.
The current paradigm of education must change for this to happen.
The writer is an Associate Professor at University of Nairobi’s Business School. Twitter: @bantigito
