Our education system, exams ruining an entire generation
What you need to know:
The results tell us that the environment in which the exam is done is not right.
An environment of a stressful exam, where teachers are absent and tests are administered by armed police, is unnatural.
It appears that most of our students cannot cope with this environment; we need to measure their anxiety levels.
With the release of last year’s KCPE and KCSE exam results, and as successful Standard Eight candidates join Form One this week, many are left wondering why there should be many students receiving grade D and below in Form Four.
I think we, adults, are failing the young people by labelling them as failures. We need to be honest about our examinations, or even the education system.
First, the results do not reflect a normal curve distribution of the population. Candidates should be concentrated in the mean or median score — around grade C-plus, C plain and C-minus.
FEEL ENTITLED
In our case, the majority lie at the tail-end of the normal curve with D-plus and below. This skewed curve tells us that all is not well with our exams. Don’t the questions come from the syllabus?
The concerned authorities need to take responsibility for destroying generations of students, making a few feel a sense of entitlement that they have passed an exam which everybody else failed. This is reflected in the behaviour of the Kenyan elites who do not give way on the roads or often jump the queue. Words such as “sorry” or “excuse me” do not exist in their vocabulary. They feel entitled to success where everybody else is a failure, making the rest of us hopeless, desperate and angry.
We see this kind of people every day — angry drivers on the roads and hopeless youth, who are alcoholics — and then we wonder where they came from. They are a product of an education that taught them not to care to respect the rules. We destroyed their human dignity.
Secondly, the skewed curve tells us that something is wrong with the delivery of the subject matter in schools. Are our teachers doing their job? If not, what do they do every day when they report to school? The Teachers Service Commission and trade unions ought to come clear on what happened to the teacher who was passionate about the welfare of students.
RESTORE DIGNITY
I remember with nostalgia my primary school headmaster, Mwalimu Lazarus Matheri, a teacher, catechist and opinion leader, who dedicatedly saw to it that pupils got their best. The TSC should seek to restore the image and dignity of the teacher. It should do some soul-searching and come up with strategies to call in the teacher rather than calling them out.
Thirdly, these results do not prepare our students for the global competition in the 21st century. We need a reinvention of the teacher, so that they can have the passion of their predecessors of the 1960s, who took over from whites and were dedicated enough to show that we were as intelligent as any other people, or we will lose an entire generation.
Fourth, the skewed curve defeats the very essence of tests and measurements in education. I remember Prof Raphael Munavu and Ms Bali’s lessons that tests and measures are meant to help to assess the coverage of a subject matter and in planning where to allocate resources so that improvements can be made in education. That kind of skew shows we are not allocating our resources as we should. By now, we should have come up with intervention for poorly performing schools and students. But it seems we do not learn; year in, year out, we post the same distorted results.
EXAM CHEATING
Fifth, the results tell us that the environment in which the exam is done is not right. An environment of a stressful exam, where teachers are absent and tests are administered by armed police, is unnatural. It appears that most of our students cannot cope with this environment; we need to measure their anxiety levels.
The war against exam cheating might create other problems. If the sight of a policeman with a gun scares me, what about these boys and girls? The cheats, if known, should be punished. But because we hire the wrong people, just because they are our relatives or tribesmen, it’s difficult to offer credible exams.
The problem began when we made education the preserve of a few; when we stopped educating people and transferring knowledge for human dignity and began a trend of educating for jobs. We need to go back to the basics of education: Making students the best version of themselves.
Dr Kinyanjui is a researcher at the Institute for Development Studies (IDS), the University of Nairobi, and an author. [email protected]
