The education mess: It’s time we abolished old-era schools

Education Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiang'i speaks at Nairobi School on December 20, 2017 during the release of 2017 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education exam results. The clamour over the quality of education in Kenya is unlikely to lead to a dramatic improvement. PHOTO | DENNIS ONSONGO | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • We needed to build a cadre of leaders, managers, bureaucrats to take over “our things” from the European colonialists.
  • The bigger crisis with education everywhere is that there’s no articulation of a grand reason for it.

A few days to Christmas, Cabinet Secretary for Education Fred Matiang’i released the results of the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examination — and they were met with an uproar.

The performance was appalling. A staggering 87.79 per cent of the candidates — 540,428 students — scored between grade C and E.

Only 70,073, about 11 per cent, qualified to join university.

In 15 of Kenya’s 47 counties, not a single student made the top 100 candidates in the exam.

Dr Matiang’i was unmoved. Ever since he became Education CS, the erstwhile flood of high scores has become a trickle.

EXAM LEAKAGE
He says, with some justification, that the problem is not that there is a problem in Kenyan education.

It is that, in the past, the system was corrupted and politicised and students who should have failed passed with glowing colours.

Now that he has got rid of the rot, we have a true picture and, therefore, can meaningfully fix the problems.

Kenya faces a very African problem. Whether in South Africa, Nigeria or Uganda, education is in the gutters.

Matiang’i’s way, though, is better than the Tanzanian approach.

Faced with mass failures, not too long ago Tanzania came up with the ultimate political and bureaucratic solution: It lowered the pass grade sharply!

PRIVATE SCHOOLS
One of the few countries on the continent bucking this trend is Rwanda.

Recently, The East African reported a strange story happening in Rwanda.

Almost everywhere in Africa, private schools do much better than government ones.

However, in Rwanda, public schools have got so much better that parents are taking their children out of private schools to the government ones in record numbers.

Private schools are closing or facing closure.

IMPROVEMENT

School proprietors decided to appeal to the government for a bailout, or essentially to go slow on improving State schools, so that they too could get some business!

That is the thing: When there is an overall improvement in the quality of education, it tends to wipe out the gap between public and private schools.

The clamour over the quality of education in Kenya is unlikely to lead to a dramatic improvement.

To appreciate that, the point needs to be made that, in Rwanda, the real reason the sector has improved is not because of investment in education as such.

If we go back a few decades, this was the case everywhere.

EDUCATION

Today, there’s probably no African who went to school (primary, secondary and university) between 1960 and 1980 who is not ashamed of the wretched state of their school today.

In the first 25 years of independence, there were overarching and emotive reasons to invest in education.

We needed to build a cadre of leaders, managers, bureaucrats to take over “our things” from the European colonialists.

The fruits of independence couldn’t be secured without education.

In that sense, people didn’t go to school to study; they did so to realise African dreams of freedom and nationhood.

The way we frame education today, children go to school to study, and maybe contribute to the economy.

REVAMP

The arguments are about quality and how appropriate the curriculum is to producing workers for a modern technological economy.

By contrast, take some time and watch discussions on education on American TV.

There are many people whining about how US education is falling behind, and threatening the country’s “global leadership”.

The world’s superpower of the future, China, on the other hand, is retooling its education, according to those spooked by its rise, for “world domination”.

The bigger crisis with education everywhere is that there’s no articulation of a grand reason for it.

SIGNIFICANCE

Governments are thinking like parents, who want their children to get an education, find a well-paying job, become independent, bear them grandchildren and take care of them in their old age.

For now, Rwanda is different. In 1994, it descended into the worst genocide the world had seen since since World War II.

It failed spectacularly, and most of the rest of the world just held its nose.

The motivation to overturn that narrative — and rub an indifferent world’s nose in its triumph — remains a powerful goal that fuels many of Rwanda’s achievements.

However, it also creates a dangerous blind spot to the pitfalls in that drive.

Still, for now, the rest of us haven’t found an equal big cause. Until we do, we won’t fix the education mess.

The author is publisher of Africapedia.com and explainer site Roguechiefs.com. Twitter@cobbo3