Families are paying higher fees than before under the higher education funding model will saddle students with hefty loans upon graduation.
This is my last installment on the ‘Confronting Kenya’s Demons’ series. But it’s by no means the end of my pieces on what ails Kenya. In this closing column, I tackle the subject that’s foundational to any country and its prospects for creating the environment in which the largest number of its people can find the greatest happiness.
Today, I write about a subject that’s been my life’s pursuit ever since I was a young kid growing up in Kitui – education. Education, the enterprise of inculcating knowledge in a populace, is the most critical gift any society can bequeath its progeny. Without knowledge, societies wallow in idiocy, stupidity, mysticism, the occult, and ignorance. Education is the pathway to knowing.
Societies that don’t know are dominated by those that do. Societies that knew included those that built the pyramids, the Incas of modern-day Peru who built Machu Picchu, and the Blacks who constructed Great Zimbabwe, and other great civilizations. Today, the Americans lead the race in knowledge.
Their great fortune in this enterprise is founded on the great American university. There’s no doubt America wouldn’t have been the most dominant society in human history without great universities, both public and private.
They continue to invest in the university. Think about this – Harvard’s endowment is $60 billion, larger than the economies of 120 countries. For comparison, Kenya’s Gross Domestic Product is $110 billion, not even double Harvard’s wealth. These are sobering stats.
Scholarship
What’s my point? At the young age of 14 in the mid-1970s, I won a scholarship to study in an American high school. I had never been out of Kenya. I was the only black child in an Illinois high school. I remember the rigour of the school day there. In retrospect, the seriousness and academic rigour was equal, if not greater, than those at Kitui School and later Alliance High School, both of which I am an alumnus. In my day, high school went up to Form 6, or A Levels. Going to university in Kenya was akin to a camel passing through the eye of a needle. The University of Nairobi had the only law school, and it took no more than 50 students a year. We were the chosen few.
I tell this story with a mixture of pride and pain. Pride that I was able to make it in that very select, elite system. Pain in that so many able Kenyans couldn’t make it in that system. It was an elite educational system, unlike the US system which educates the masses, differentiated largely by the prestige and quality of the college one gets into. Americans educate large swathes of their population in state colleges and universities. These are the backbone of the America prosperity and its educational genius. Since the 8-4-4 system that abandoned the previous highly exclusive design, Kenya’s educational system has sunk into the toilet. Nothing has worked despite the quixotic attempts to reform the system.
A five-minute conversation with any Kenyan can tell you whether they went to the A Levels system or the much inferior 8-4-4 failed experiment. Many products of the 8-4-4 system have no culture of reading, or thirst for hard-to-find knowledge. They grew up in the “Cheating Era” when exams were bought and sold in the open market with the collusion of high officials in the Ministry of Education, Teachers Service Commission, and school principals. The primary and secondary school terminal exams are not believable at all. At the university, some teachers dish out grades for sexual favours like so many cheap cups of tea. The result is that many of our university graduates are incapable of good writing, or competence in stringing intelligent sentences together. Logical thinking is a foreign concept. Tik Tok is craze.
Competency-Based Curriculum
Elites with money know Kenya’s educational system has totally collapsed. That’s why they steal public monies to send their kids to schools in America, Europe, and even Australia. The less well-off ship their children off to mediocre schools in India. Out of this sewer, we have landed in another mess called the Competency-Based Curriculum. That’s another experiment doomed to fail. Why? Because it’s ill-thought, underfunded, rushed, and doesn’t address the reasons for the failure of the 8-4-4 system. We are going from the frying pan and into the fire. The people in charge of our educational system know diddly-squat. Frankly, I am beyond despair. What we need is a true rethinking of our educational system.
We should halt the transition to the CBC system and take real stoke with people who aren’t vested in the current corrupt system under the guise of the CBC. Let’s form a team of experts composed of Kenyans and foreigners with great knowledge and experience in education.
This group should recommend how we can create a credible, rigorous, accessible, and forward-looking system. Primary and secondary schools aren’t the places to teach technical, labour-focused skills. That’s for technical post-secondary training or universities.
Makau Mutua is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Margaret W. Wong Professor at Buffalo Law School, The State University of New York. On X: @makaumutua.
