Kenya needs an education shake-up
The sciences and vocations are not the only source of learning, yet schools overemphasise them
This is a call to Kenyans to reflect on the lies about education circulating in the media, schooling system and government. Using buzzwords such as “quality” and “global standards”, sharks seek to destroy the hopes, dreams, and creativity of young Africans, and to make a profit while at it.
They spread hatred for education while ironically creating a thirst for schooling that makes parents resort to desperate measures, going as far as accepting violence and abuse in schools that cause children to take their own lives.
This insanity must end.
We must accept that education is a lifelong endeavour through which people constantly adapt to their social and natural environment. Education is more than going to school and getting the right paper credentials. Education occurs anywhere where human beings process what they perceive, make decisions about it and act together in solidarity. That is why education, culture, and access to information are inseparable.
However, since colonial times, both the colonial and “independence” versions of the Kenya government have worked hard to separate education from culture and access to information. They have done so through crushing all other avenues where Kenyans can create knowledge.
We have insufficient public libraries and our museums are underfunded. Arts festivals, where people come together and learn from unique cultural expressions, have been underfunded, and by some accounts, donors have been explicitly told not to fund creativity and culture. In the meantime, artists are insulted, exploited and sometimes silenced through censorship, public ridicule, and moralistic condemnations in the name of faith.
All these measures are designed to isolate the school as the only source of learning and creativity, and this is what makes the entry into schools so cut-throat and abusive.
But entering school does not mean the end of the abuse. Once inside school, Kenyans find that there is no arts education where children can explore ideas and express themselves. In school, they find teachers who themselves are subject to insults and disruptions from the Ministry of Education and the Teachers Service Commission.
Under a barrage of threats and transfers, teachers are forced to implement competency-based training, which is incoherent and has been rejected in other countries. Many of the teachers eventually absorb the rationality of abuse and mete it out on children whose crime is to want to learn. This desperation for education has also been weaponised by the corporate world that is offering expensive private education and blackmailing parents to line the pockets of book publishers.
By the end of primary and secondary school, only 3% of candidates are able to continue with their education. This situation worsens inequality in Kenya, where only 2% of the population have a university degree, and where only 8 300 people own as much as the rest of Kenya.
The corporate sector reduces education to job training and condemns the school system as inadequate for meeting their needs.
Yet going by statements from the Kenya Private Sector Alliance (Kepsa) and government, there is no intention to employ Kenyans. The government hires doctors from Cuba and engineers from China, and then promises the UK to export our medical workers. Kepsa is on record saying we need to train workers in technical and vocational fields so that they can work in other African countries.
It is clear that the Kenya government and the corporate sector do not want Kenyans to go to school and become active citizens in their homeland. Rather, these entities are treating schooling as a conveyor belt to manufacture Kenyans for export as labour and to cushion the theft of public resources.
The media and church join in the war against education by brainwashing Kenyans to accept this. The media bombards Kenyans with lies about the composition of university students, and with propaganda against “useless degrees”. The church has abandoned prophecy and baptises every flawed educational policy in exchange for keeping religion in the curriculum to pacify Kenyans in the name of “morality”.
The government is now intending to restrict education further through the competency-based curriculum, which seeks to limit education by preventing children from pursuing subjects of their interests, and by imposing quotas on who can pursue education beyond secondary school.
At tertiary level, the government is devising an algorithm that will starve the humanities and social sciences of funding. It claims funds will go to medical and engineering sciences, in line with development needs.
But recall that foreigners are doing the work of medical professionals and engineers anyway, so “development” here does not mean that
Kenyan professionals will work in their home country. They will work abroad where they cannot be active citizens and raise questions about our healthcare and infrastructure.
The proposed defunding of the arts, humanities and social sciences aims to achieve one goal: to reserve thinking and creativity for the 3% of Kenyans who can afford it. This discrimination in funding of university education is about locking the majority and the poor out of spaces where they can be creative and develop ideas. It also seeks to prevent Kenyans from humble backgrounds from questioning policies that are largely studied in the humanities and social sciences.
There is a war against education and against Kenyans being creative and active citizens in their own country. For the 8 300 Kenyans to maintain their monopoly of resources, they need to distract Kenyans with propaganda against education, they need to limit Kenyans’ access to schooling, and they must shut down alternative sources of knowledge.
By limiting access to schooling and certificates, the 8 300 can exploit the work of Kenyans who have not been to school by arguing that those Kenyans lack the “qualifications” necessary for better pay.
The greedy ambitions of the political class are entrenched by people who, themselves, have been through the school system. To adapt Michelle Obama’s words, these people walked through the door of opportunity, and are trying to close it behind them, instead of reaching out and giving more Kenyans the same opportunities that helped them to succeed.
This tyranny is maintained by a section of teachers, professors and bureaucrats who fear students and citizens who know more than they do, instead of taking joy in the range of Kenyan creativity and knowledge. They, are seduced with benchmarking trips abroad, are spoon-fed foreign policies to implement in Kenya.
They harvest the legitimate aspirations of Kenya and repackage them in misleading slogans. For instance, they refer to limited opportunities as “nurturing talent”, and baptise the government’s abandonment of its role in providing social services “parental involvement.”
The media gives obscure soundbites that say nothing about what is happening on the ground. They make empty calls for a return to a precolonial Africa, which they will not even let us learn about, because they have blocked the learning of history and are writing policies to defund the arts and humanities.
We must take these people to task. We call on them to repent this betrayal of their own people in the name of “global standards.”
We need an expanded idea of education. We need arts centres and libraries, and guilds and unions to help professionals and workers take charge of regulation, training and knowledge in their specialisations. We need for all work to be recognised independent of certification, so people can be paid for work regardless of whether one has been to school.
We need recognition of our traditional skills in healing, midwifery, pastoralism, crafts and construction. We need social recognition of achievement outside business and politics. It is a pity our runners, scientists, thinkers, artists and activists who gain international fame are hardly recognised in Kenya because they were busy working, rather than stealing public funds to campaign in the next election. Our ideas are harvested by foreign companies while our government bombards us with bureaucracy and taxes which ensure that we have no impact here.
We need an end to the obsession with foreign money. We are tired of being viewed as labour for export, of foreigners being treated as more important than the Kenyan people. We are tired of tourism based on the tropes of the colonial explorer.
Development, whatever that means, comes from the brains and muscles of Kenyans. The key to becoming human beings who contribute to society is education. Not education in the limited sense of jobs and certificates, but education in the broader sense of dignity, creativity, knowledge, and solidarity.