- Enock Okong’o draws lessons from Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise, perseverance and emphasis on education and knowledge.
- He challenges students to overcome setbacks through discipline while urging teachers to reject mediocrity in classrooms.
- The writer argues that imagination, persistence and committed teaching can help learners build better futures.
Two centuries after his death, the name Napoleon Bonaparte still echoes beyond the battlefields of Europe. Born on the island of Corsica with no wealth and no title, he rose to reshape laws, institutions and nations. Yet beyond the wars and crowns, Napoleon’s life carries lessons that speak directly to our time, and none are more urgent than the lessons for students and teachers who seek determined success.
Napoleon once said that “Imagination rules the world.” For a student sitting in a crowded classroom in Nairobi, Kisii or Eldoret, that sentence is an invitation. It means the future is not written by background, by school fees or by the size of a textbook. It is written by what you dare to imagine and what you are willing to work for.
Napoleon was a cadet who studied while others slept, who mastered mathematics, artillery, geography and law not because he loved every page, but because he understood that knowledge is the first form of power. “Victory belongs to the most persevering,” he asserted, and perseverance is exactly what determined success demands today. A failed exam is not a final verdict. A difficult subject is not a wall. It is a door, and the student who keeps knocking will see a new world revealed.
Teachers as nation builders
But no student succeeds alone. Behind every determined learner must stand a determined teacher.
Napoleon also said, “You become a commander by commanding.” The teacher commands the classroom not with fear, but with vision. The teacher who arrives early, who marks every book, who explains once more when the class does not understand, is doing the work of nation building.
Napoleon reformed education in France because he knew that an empire without schools would collapse. In the same way, our schools will not rise by policy alone. They will rise because teachers refuse to accept mediocrity and insist that every child, no matter how poor or how slow, can learn.
Teachers today are navigating CBC, digital learning, large classes and limited resources. Determined success means embracing change anyway and pulling students along.
The wider world can also learn from him. He told leaders that “A leader is a dealer in hope.” To business people, he urged careful deliberation followed by decisive action. These ideas point to one truth: progress begins when people stop waiting and start doing.
Yet it is in schools where that truth must be lived first.
A student who believes that the impossible can be overcome will open books at night and ask questions in class. A teacher who believes that every child can excel will stay late to coach, innovate with little and not give up on the weakest learner.
Together, they create the kind of determination that Napoleon embodied when he rose from obscurity to command an empire.
Determination in difficult times
The world in 2026 is not short of challenges. Unemployment, poverty and hopelessness are real. But Napoleon’s life reminds us that circumstances do not determine destiny. Mindset does.
When students think, when teachers think, when both refuse to be limited by what is, a new world is revealed.
If Kenya and the world want determined success, we must return to the classroom with Napoleon’s spirit. Let the student be hungry for knowledge instead of torching schools, as witnessed recently across the country. Let them demand better from their institutions and teachers through discipline, performance and refusing to accept mediocrity.
Let the teacher be relentless in instruction, innovative with the little they have and committed to lifting every learner.
Together, with imagination and perseverance, they will reveal a new world.
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The future of our nation will not be written in Parliament or in boardrooms alone. It will be written first on the desks of students and on the chalkboards of teachers who have decided to succeed, no matter what.
By Enock Okong’o
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