“The mass failure” that the Daily Nation reported below its “splash” headline on Friday concerning last year’s performance in one of Kenya’s nationally defining examinations raised at least one fundamental question for our national education planners: What exactly had the examiners examined?
Socially speaking, what do our schools teach at that and other levels?
Let us put the question more generally. With exactly what social purpose do Kenya’s parents spend so much of their meagre incomes on the schooling of their children?
I pose this question in order to remind all those concerned of the two kinds of answer that the question seeks from them.
It is, of course, good to pass an examination.
KNOWLEDGE
And – as many of our children did this year – it is excellent to pass them with flying colours.
And – as many of our children did this year – it is excellent to pass them with flying colours.
For classroom learning is what will enable a young person to pass on either into the job market as a knowledgeable, competent and productive person or into an institution of higher learning in order to sharpen one’s knowledge and one’s skills even more cuttingly.
The other purpose of education is to produce an increasingly greater number of Kenyans socio-mentally conducive to a future more satisfying in material, mental and cultural terms.
But that immediately raises one question. Why bother?
Socially speaking, of what use is merely academic knowledge to any individual Kenyan?
PRODUCTIVITY
Is merely academic learning the real reason that every Kenyan parent is so desperately keen to spend so much of his or her extremely meagre income on the schooling of his or her child?
Is merely academic learning the real reason that every Kenyan parent is so desperately keen to spend so much of his or her extremely meagre income on the schooling of his or her child?
I say “merely” because, considered alone, academic knowledge is not what William Shakespeare – that keen observer of the human society – would have called “… the be-all and the end-all here …”
Academic knowledge and professional training can be useful to one’s society only if it gears one towards social compassion and productive social service.
Deeper knowledge and training can be of social use only if they lead to socially deeper processes of thinking and doing – namely, only if they lead to greater social awareness and active commitment to one’s society.
IMPORTANCE
Without it, education can provide nothing more than academic knowledge.
Without it, education can provide nothing more than academic knowledge.
No, I do not look down upon academic achievements.
Indeed, I stress the importance of as much academic knowledge as possible.
For, without it, we would have no criterion of preferment in teaching at any level.
Yet Kenya’s educated class clamours only for personal ingratiation from our extremely small national cash granary.
That is why our education remains so far behind our social requirements.
POVERTY
It remains completely inadequate to lift us out of our national poverty, especially of thought.
We remain committed to nothing but personal material goals, at best – as in politics – only to what we imagine to be in our ethnic interest.
How many Kenyans are aware that even personal gains can lead us to national greatness only if the gains have a communal channel of expense so as to benefit us nationally, namely, only if the gains stem from awareness that we have achieved them through a community inter-ethnic and inter-racial hands and brains?
That is the answer to those who seek and occupy high offices merely so as to be in a position to grab as greedily as chrysalises.
ACADEMIC
They never think of any goal that can assure us a healthier and more peaceful existence as a human association.
They never think of any goal that can assure us a healthier and more peaceful existence as a human association.
Thus, as the intellectual arrogance of our university lecturers indicates, the word academic has acquired so many terribly negative connotations.
Academic may nowadays mean merely ethereal, irrelevant, existing merely in the imagination.
That is why the Ministry must reassure its customers – all of us – that our higher learning institutions are not teaching what are merely ethereal – what, as we learn from one of Mark Twain’s hilarious short stories, a “founding father” in America’s revolutionary days once condemned as “high-sounding nothings”.
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