Your child’s education. Make it or break it

In My Early Life, the legendary Winston Churchill mourns his education as a ‘menace,’ which attacked his life with painstaking boredom and sought to inform him how he knew nothing. He describes the content taught as ‘that which never engaged my reason, interest and will.’ How Latin and French was forced at the expense of English, which was a preserve for weak students in Britain. His boredom recount closely resonates with many and sounds close to the recent attempt to make optional our much neglected Swahili by the Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC).

The right to learn
In Kenya, the right to education features in the Children Act of 2001 where Section 7 of the Act provides that Every child shall be entitled to education the provision of which shall be the responsibility of the Government and the parents. Subsection (2) provides that every child shall be entitled to free basic education which shall be compulsory in accordance with Article 28 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Kenya has approved and adopted this convention through the Children’s Act. People who go against this law by denying a child the right to attend school, subject themselves to a term of imprisonment not exceeding 12 months or to a fine not exceeding Ksh 50,000, or both imprisonment and fine.

Some concern is that the current constitution offers no guarantee on the right to education. However the proposed draft does. The harmonized draft in clause 63 provides every person with the right to education; it requires the State to make pre-primary and primary education free and compulsory. It requires the government to pay special attention to children with special needs and also make secondary and post secondary education available and accessible. This is an immense step in the right direction since, although primary education has been free and compulsory, pre-primary education hasn’t. Kindergarten and nursery education will be free if Kenyans adopt the draft.

In 2003, basic education became compulsory and free. The school- going number of children continually rises annually since. These gains must be celebrated because they are commendable. However, more remains to be done especially in the area of improving learning facilities so that pupils won’t have to sit in congested classrooms or read under trees. The pupil-teacher ratio and more individualized attention in the learning process also need to be attended to make the free education more effective. Further, Children going to non- formal schools/community schools in the urban slums should have secured more Free Primary Education funding to bring their book- pupil ratio at par with those attending public schools.

Once again, all children are entitled to the Right to Free Quality Primary Education and the government cannot afford to neglect that.

Genius vs Bimbo
Another concern is the much lauded KCPE and KCSE results. When you joined nursery school, the main objective of your patient teacher was to imprint upon your attention-deficient mind how the alphabet looks like, its pronunciation and a few numbers. Later on, the English teacher impressed upon you to merge alphabetical letters to words and judicially fuse them to make sense in a sentence. The math’s teacher used numbers in a distorted way over and over sometimes borrowing and carrying to arrive at a hardly fought mathematical answer. The smart crammer always shone, was celebrated shoulder high and pictures splashed on news (for almost a week). They told us that the bright boy/girl in class was destined for success, glory and wealth. The bottom lasts were doomed bimbos who were to become handy men and casual labourers.

How false we all know this turned out. Yet we cling to the intellectual gauges our faulty system gave us, believing nothing but the white colour to be the greatest fruit of education. Although our society is opening up to varying fruits independent of our education system, our curriculum, especially in primary and secondary education remains mainstreamed to conventional ‘white colour’ fruits. We rarely ask:

Why private schools dazzle in KCPE but later become toast of public schools in KCSE. Why we have fewer subject options for high school students

Why we give no academic merit to co-extra curricular activities like most systems do. Why a great number of Kenyan students cross over to Uganda for higher education. Who reviews our education curriculum at university level. Why almost all of our tertiary polytechnics and colleges are being turned to universities and what criteria is being used. How much our government invests in higher education research compared to other economic sectors. Is it an intelligencia game show of ‘Who’s-smarter-now-at-cramming’ devoid of application or reasoning and analysis? The list is endless, but as parents we need to have objective answers.

Wake-up call
Sound collective responses should begin with more funding to higher education, especially research. There should be strengthening of the supervisory powers of the Higher Education Commission to check the quality of university curriculum and vet the upgrading of colleges to universities; Hiring more qualified teachers (not interns) for the over- crowded primary school classes; Giving academic merit for co-curricular activities like debates, community work, drama and sports; Reviewing the curriculum regularly to make it more relevant and practical to our nation’s pressing needs; Employing ex-cathedral classroom delivery style where students participate in class and engage their reasoning in learning; and improving examination questions to the point that requires reasoning and analysis-to reduce cheating cases.

While there are pertinent issues to raise with architects of our education system, there still are responsibilities begging as parents, siblings, and citizens. As babies are growing; are we allowing them to play with a variety of learning aids to help them find their interests, are planning to support their career-choices, school choices and educational interests, or are we keen on executing our will upon them for our own ends and prestige? There was a point the former president Moi was trying to make when he introduced the 8.4.4 system (with a variety subjects) that was lost somewhere in the implementation.

Education is to serve us, develop us and make us practical solutions. It is not a cosmetic gimmick to better jobs, stature and promotions. For policy makers: as you sit to deliberate, remember that salient feature on education.

To us all country men of good will, tether on the words of Plato who in his wisdom advised that ‘Do not train children to learning by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.’

There’ is a brilliant child locked inside every student. Let them play, and become alive by learning unbound by a system that imprisons them with stale facts. That is proper education for your child.

The writer is a Lawyer with CREW (Center for Rights Education and Awareness).

END: BL 31 / 32-33