I started my education in rural Kenya
along the Manga Ridge in Kisii District. The only qualification you
needed to join Standard One was to get your hand over the head and touch
your ear on the opposite side.
Here everything
including English was taught in Kisii. Teachers were mostly Standard
Eight dropouts and had hardly travelled past Kisii Town. It was
considered a crime if you asked a question in class and some of us got
six lashes (this was the standard punishment) on our buttocks for
“disturbing” the teacher.
Our classes were built out of
mud. A contraption of wooded frame made for our windows. Every Friday
we carried cow dung to smear the floor and allow the classes to dry up
over the weekend. This was the innovative way to fight against
jiggers. Our classmate Micah had not been lucky before he joined
school, at some point he had been infected with jiggers. If he walked
southward, his feet faced east and west. Teachers and students were not
kind to him as they showcased him every moment to show what would
happen to us in the event we allowed jiggers on our feet. We called
Micah, Masansa. The word had no real meaning but it implied
his feet were funny. We psychologically tortured him and destroyed his
self-esteem to the extent that one day he tried to take his life by
trying to jump over the cliff. He later quit school.
TRULY OUT OF SYNC
As
we progressed through the classes, it had become unbearable to continue
teaching in vernacular. All books were in English but the teachers
would poorly translate the material to the extent even the kids realized
that we were truly out of sync. We nicknamed all the teachers with
protest names. For example the General Paper teacher, we called him egunia memory
(the sack memory) because he used to insist that we memorize everything
he said in class. He lived at a distant Market called Tin’ga and rode
his bicycle every morning to Kioge, our school. By the time he reached
school he smelt of sweat and his clothes resembled pieces of sack and
hence we called him sack memory.
By the time we were in
Standard Seven, most of the pupils could hardly speak English, the
language used in the exam. In bid to get the pupils learn fast the
teachers introduced a piece of wood that was passed on to you if you
spoke in vernacular. This piece of wood was called a disk that every
evening we named the student that we passed it to. Virtually every
pupil got the disk since we spoke Kisiienglish (Kisii English)
as we struggled to learn this foreign language. If a teacher sent you
to get something from one of their colleague, you would say natomua by teacher (been
sent by teacher) and there you got the disk which meant in the evening
you got three lashes. Even some teachers had problems translating such
names as Cape of Good Hope to which egunia called aase ogosemeria (literally meaning the place of hope).
LIFELONG BONDS
With
such struggle obviously the exam outcome was barely above average when
compared with city schools where scoring the maximum 36 points was
pretty common. Whenever we encountered excellent performers, we were
often thoroughly intimidated and subdued. There was little confidence
in us. It was a thrill for us whenever we performed better than most
of good performers many of whom came from well to do families. This
indeed helped create lifelong bonds between two different social
backgrounds. This was Kenya with one single system of education for the
rich and poor. A common ground for understanding our past, present,
and future together. Today, the gap between the rich and poor has
widened not just economically but socially. We have embraced two
divergent systems of education that will further alienate the poor from
the rich.
A new policy of favouring children from public schools
irrespective of their performance, will kill private investment in
education and is disenfranchising poor parents who have sacrificed
everything they own to have their children get into what used to be
Kenya’s centers of excellence. I never had points to take me to
Alliance but I will defend a merit system that would guarantee the
school as one of the centers of excellence. Every country has some
centers of excellence that have served the poor and rich equally. It is
defeatist to tell a child who scored 435 out of the possible 500 points
that he or she cannot be taken to a school of his or her choice just
because the parents took him or her to a private school. The child will
grow up knowing there is discrimination. Such discrimination does not
fix the problems we have with public education.
BLACK MARKETEERING
The
new policy is counterproductive since it has opened up new avenues for
black marketeering where students are registered in public schools while
receiving tuition at private schools. Capping admissions to good
schools based on systemic failure is like price controls which in the
long run will kill innovation and encourage corruption. For a start we
need to fix the system. We must be bold enough to either revert to the
old system which did not require huge investments but served us well or
wholeheartedly accept the British system now common with private
schools. The 8-4-4 simply has too many subjects for a developing
country like Kenya to afford.
Most of the courses in
8-4-4 need to be transferred to Technical Industrial Vocational
Education and Training (TIVET) institutions. It is absurd that we do
not have Masons, Carpenters, Mechanics, Electricians and many more other
trades, yet many of our youth are unemployed. Since part of the
reasons why youth shun training in trades is due to social dynamics, we
need to mount a massive campaign to sensitize youth on becoming
independent by exploiting all available opportunities. We need to
diversify university education. Today almost 50 per cent of university
students are studying business when the economy needs several other
professions. There are no psychologists to help the likes of Micah. If
Dr Njenga decided to migrate to Hawaii, we shall not hear much about
Psychiatry.
Although we had more play and little
learning during our formative stages, we eventually caught up. Children
should spend much of their early years exploring and playing. The
Norwegian system is more like what I grew up doing. Like in a field of
roses, children bloom at different stages, the reason why we must learn
to be patient with our children. There is no need to bundle pupils like
in a production line where we condemn bad products.
Dr.
Ndemo is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Business
School, Lower Kabete Campus. He is a former Permanent Secretary,
Ministry of Information and Communication. Twitter: @bantigito
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