Unrest: Who shall love and save our children?

The formal school system will still be around in the next few centuries. It won’t be easy to change from the school compound, classroom, uniform-wearing children, textbooks (or tablets, if you like), the teacher standing before the class and the bell ringer, any time soon.

Especially so in Africa. In most parts of rural (and even urban) Kenya, the school is still a very big part of everyday life. In some parts it is the only way out of extreme poverty.

Parents still invest millions of shillings to pay for their children’s education. Children still see schooling as the only way out of the ‘work’ at home – herding cattle, caring for their siblings, doing house chores, or getting married early, or a seemingly uneventful life. So, whatever the naysayers say, school is here to stay for some time into the future.

How, therefore, can children – a majority of the school going lot is below 18 years of age – just wake up one morning and start burning their schools?

How can children who are otherwise well-behaved at home turn into criminals in a day? Many of these schools experiencing upheavals would appear quite orderly under normal circumstances. What has changed?

FOLLOW WHIMS
Maybe nothing has changed. Maybe the children are just being children – behaving in an inexplicable manner. Children are wont to follow their whims every now and then.

Often they may not have an answer for the adult seeking to know why they are behaving waywardly. Anyone who has lived with children, all the way into the young adult category knows that applying logic to youngsters’ actions doesn’t always give you the answers you seek.

But why are these youngsters ‘acting’ and not ‘dialoguing?’

First, the standard Kenyan secondary school is a mini prison. It runs on a pseudo-military academy regime. The daily regimen is about obey, obey and obey. Don’t ask questions.

Speak when spoken to. And if responding, don’t ‘lie’ to the teacher. Read, read and read. No play here. There are schools that deliberately discourage co-curricular activities, even though they are part of the syllabus. Head teachers argue that drama, music, football or debating clubs are a waste of time and money, and won’t improve the school’s national examinations mean score.

MILITARY CAMPS

Military camps are not holiday camps. In military school, the basics of life are rationed. Survival of the fittest is a rule you learn to live with; or you die.

Yes, there are too many schools in this country in which the food offered to young growing bodies is just too little. There are schools where these children queue to relieve themselves, bathe, eat, dress etc. These are conditions that are completely new and disturbing for so many of the ones who weren’t in boarding in primary school.

Secondly, is there someone out there who studied in a ‘normal’ Kenyan school who wasn’t terrorised by the mere presence of some particular teacher? I am not just speaking of the ‘kiboko’ regime that resolved all manners of problems through corporal punishment.

I mean the teachers who had some choice words to humiliate, dismiss, belittle or remind one that you were a mere student.

Lazy, stupid, good-for-nothing, bastard, idler, harebrained etc, are terms that school going children live with every day. It is surprising that many high school leavers don’t seek psychiatric help.

INFRASTRUCTURE

The third glaring problem, and probably the scariest to think about, is the state of our secondary schools’ infrastructure.

Some of these schools should be closed and rebuilt before learners are readmitted. In many of them today there isn’t just enough space – no suitable classrooms, no legroom in the available classrooms, no comfortable chairs, no desks worth the name, no adequate bathrooms or toilets, the dormitories are like police holding cells on Friday night, no playgrounds, no rooms for non-academic skills etc.

In some, even the teachers don’t have staffrooms. There are schools in this country that were built by the colonialists which seem to never have been improved since the 1950s.

The fourth obvious problem is the increased intake of students in many of these schools, which has worsened the situation with more learners having to be supervised by fewer teachers.

Yet supervision of the young is a very important factor in their growth. How does one establish respect for hierarchy in a crowd of excited young learners?

How does one show these learners how to endure difficult circumstances when things worsen by the day? How does the teacher even teach in such circumstances with inadequate teaching space and limited teaching aids?

LOVE COLLEAGUES
How does one begin to show these young people to love themselves and love their colleagues, teachers, siblings, parents, relatives, neighbours etc?

How can you love yourself when the conditions in which you live are particularly dehumanizing?

What methods would one employ to educate these young people to see themselves as spiritual, cultural and social beings? How do we make them feel that they are people who actually belong to the family, school and the wider community?

Probably those who argue that this is a case of sheer indiscipline and criminality are right. But how many of us would call their children criminals?

How many parents out there would allow their children to be dishonoured – which is what we mean when government officials declare that those judged to have been involved in burning schools or promoting hooliganism will have a lifelong criminal record against their names!

REBUILDING

Some of these troubled schools need rebuilding – structurally, academically and socially. Some of the learners need serious counselling, mentorship and some love.

Definitely the learners have their part of cross to carry.
However, it is the adults in the lives of these children that need to do some serious introspection. Parents, teachers, school managers, the immediate community, the government, all need to rethink why we take children to school, what we expect them to achieve in school, what do we wish for them post-school etc.

Dr Odhiambo teaches literature at the University of Nairobi. [email protected]