I am a scientist, but to kill arts is foolhardy
What you need to know:
- It is my opinion that our intensely anti-intellectual establishment is on a campaign to condition the population away from any form of critical thought.
- Officialdom has resolved to kill any interest in history in order to bolster our revisionist tendencies.
- A people without a sense of history will only drift aimlessly through time and will be subject to the whims and wishes of their erstwhile masters.
The die is cast. It is now government policy to pivot away from the ‘too academic’ university education towards the ‘more practical’ technical and vocational training. The argument in government circles is that university training is mostly useless, and even when it is meant to be useful its quality has been so adulterated that the graduates are not fit for purpose. This argument was recently echoed by the Deputy President William Ruto after defending his doctoral thesis at the University of Nairobi.
INTELLECTUAL OUTSIDERS
The Deputy President outrightly dismissed programmes in history, geography, sociology and anthropology, deriding them as useless since they produce graduates who are not needed by ‘industry’. According to media reports, he argued that there is no point learning about historical figures like Vasco da Gama because after all their discoveries, they died. The Deputy President’s view is not isolated, and is common even within the dwarfish Kenyan Academy. Science scholars have long looked down upon their arts and social studies peers, considering them as intellectual outsiders and dreamers engaged in Sisyphean tasks without any tangible output.
HEAVIEST CASUALTIES
Unfortunately those of us in science commit a grave sin to ignore what our colleagues in the ‘useless’ arts are doing. The first cause for worry is that the onslaught against the arts scholars is only the most obvious front of the anti-intellectual war against the academy. The government policy to reduce funding to universities in general and focus more on technical training will result in an even more denuded academic environment in our universities, and the resource-intensive sciences will be the first and heaviest casualties.
SPOON-FEEDING
The second cause for worry is more conceptual. It is my opinion that our intensely anti-intellectual establishment is on a campaign to condition the population away from any form of critical thought. Officialdom has resolved to kill any interest in history in order to bolster our revisionist tendencies. A people without a sense of history will only drift aimlessly through time and will be subject to the whims and wishes of their erstwhile masters. Without history we cannot really speak of a future! The onslaught against philosophy and social studies is not accidental. The intention appears to be to destroy any vestiges of critical thought remaining in this country, leaving the population extremely unhinged and in the vulnerable condition of depending on ideological spoon-feeding from the few that ‘know’.
OUR DEMISE
Exclusive focus on technical training will obviously be useful in the ‘making’ industry, but will also end up producing largely mindless automatons at the disposal of their immediate ‘supervisor’. It will be extremely dangerous for us to disregard and eliminate the philosophers and historians in the guise of producing more scientists and technicians.
We cannot afford to leave the task of theorising and explaining Kenya to people from other countries that take these subjects more seriously, unless we want to be completely forgotten within a generation of our demise!
Atwoli is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Dean, Moi University School of Medicine; [email protected]
