Jomo Kenyatta’s five crucial lessons in educating a Kenyan
President Jomo Kenyatta. His book ‘Facing Mount Kenya’ contains solutions to the problems bedevilling our education sector. PHOTO| FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP
This is why in this period of remembering Jomo Kenyatta, I think we could look at the six lessons or stages of educating a Gikuyu child, as he spells it out in Facing Mount Kenya.
These are lessons that can be found in several, if not all other Kenyan communities.
The one disturbing thing about our system of education is that it is so pegged on foreign models that when it suffers shocks, as it is experiencing today, we are at a total loss on what to do. We can hardly say that our curricula draws any inspiration from our cultures, histories, spirituality, thinking, or everyday life. We have borrowed so much from the rest of the world without tampering it with some local pedagogy.
If there is anything in our syllabi, it is very basic, kind of ‘traditional’, as we like saying. Yet, we could have made a wonderful mukimo of an education system if we had bothered to borrow ingredients from our cultures, histories and philosophies.
