By Ashford Kimani
Not so long ago, I attended an education stakeholders meeting where one of the speakers summarised the current state of education in the country thus: “We have learners who are forced to go to schools they don’t like, take subjects they don’t want, with teachers who are not willing to teach and the modern parents who are not available for their children.” How sad!
School is never fun like it used to be. Learners dread Mondays and look forward to weekends. The pressures on exams and grades have made learners loathe going to schools. School is a punishment where errant children are confined to so they cannot cause nuisance at home.
Parents use schools as “holding” places where their children can be contained and managed the whole day.
When schools close for months, we hear parents complaining asking what to do with children at home because they don’t want their children ‘idling’ at home.
If teachers fail to issue homework, parents are up in arms condemning the teacher for not engaging his or her children in the evening after school.
Other parents take their children to boarding schools not out of love but to deal with these ‘destructive’ children whose stay at home could cause them mental torture.
They take them to boarding schools as early as when they are 9 years so that they can delegate their parenting roles to teachers.
By so doing, these parents abscond their parental responsibilities.
Not many parents are willing to parent their children as they are ‘busy’ chasing this or that errand in the name of looking for money.
The education reforms presently in their phase one of the national roll out could not have come at a better time.
Education standards in Kenyan had reached bottom rock. Most primary and secondary schools were churning out half baked graduates when the job market had started raising a red flag. Universities were the hardest hit with many first and second years swapping degree courses by dropping ‘harder’ ones to take up ‘easy’ ones.
The examination oriented 8-4-4 system of education was producing graduates with disappointing employability skills.
Companies are being forced to spend millions of shillings on staff training. This is because the 8-4-4 acted as a mere conveyor belt.
The high premium placed on grades only focused on end as opposed to means. The national exams were a matter of life and death. Students only focused on cramming and memorizing concepts.
Open ended questions and the conventional multiple choice questions did not make matters better. If anything, they encouraged rote learning.
The system was not churning out entrepreneurs but graduates to work in offices. The purpose for education is entrepreneurship not employment. Entrepreneurs create wealth and employment. Entrepreneurship breeds innovators and inventors who establish manufacturing factories.
The 8-4-4 system of education has created education wastages. Graduates of 8-4-4 are miserable job seekers who even lack soft skills and interview communication skills. It is ridiculous when a masters graduate fails an interview because of incoherent communication skills.
With the introduction of Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) we can all heave a sigh of relief.
The new curriculum designs emphasize definite career paths that one can pursue as early as Pre-Primary.
The burden of exams that forces schools to drill learners will be a thing of the past. If we start right, the competency based curriculum will herald radical changes in the education sector. If teachers adhere to the demands of this curriculum, the final product will be globally attractive.
Children will like school, teachers will enjoy their career and parents will be proud to take up their rightful roles in parenting their children. I can’t wait for 2028 to see the first product of the 2:6:6:3 curriculum.
The writer is a teacher in Kiambu County.
