By Victor Ochieng’
vochieng.90@gmail.com.
Immediately KCPE 2019 results were released, the Form One Selection and Placement exercise started in post-haste, just as it is happening now for the 2021 class. But the 2019 placement statistics revealed that most pupils had selected high-end national schools without good guidance, and careful counsel. The Cabinet Secretary of Education, Professor George Magoha, commented about it while delivering a speech full of self-aggrandizement as he is always used to. This was in the head teachers’ conference held in Mombasa.
It was clear like crystal; the pupils erred a lot the time they did selection of secondary schools. For instance, some pupils selected three top secondary schools perhaps due to utter ignorance. That is why some of them were called in some schools they least expected. The wonder of wonders, some of them sadly missed the placements in secondary schools. This was not a laughing matter, but a grave matter that needed to be looked into in an in-depth manner.
When pupils commit such grievous goofs, we don’t blame them per se. Instead, we blame the teachers and parents that are supposed to offer good guidance and tutelage. Before these pupils select secondary schools of their choices capturing each category, the powers-that-be should ensure that they have been guided well. So that they don’t make mortal mistakes.
Just to abut this argument, let us use career counselling as a classic case. In high school, before Form Two students select the subjects, they are guided first. Form Fours are also guided before they select university and college courses. As one of the mentors of high school scholars, any time I offer guidance to Form Four students, I don’t tell them that some universities are better than others.
First, we always channel our focus on selection of courses, then search for universities that offer such courses. I also take time to educate them on issues to do with cut-off and cluster points; that sometimes are not the same as far as university admissions are concerned. Therefore, it is futile to just think that University of Nairobi is the best academe in the country. After all, some only settle on it because it is perched in the City in the Sun – Nairobi – the jungle of concrete – where tall buildings kiss the skies, and caress the scudding clouds.
In retrospect, our pupils preparing to transit to high school, sometimes are in a state of dilemma, because the guidance is not properly done. Some parents and even teachers make them think that some schools are far much better than others. Somehow, it is why when they join some schools, they refuse to settle. They remain depressed and stressed. Why? Because stress is caused by being here yet you want to be there.
Every girl who sat for KCPE 2019, yearned to be admitted at Pangani Girls, while every boy wanted to be at Mang’u School. One of my jocular friends told me that around ten boys nearly applied for Pangani Girls. When I heard this jest, I just laughed with might.
How come that most of these children become so obsessed with some schools? I think there was a gold rush to Pangani Girls because of the peak performance they posted in KCSE 2018.
But these things keep changing. Grounds are prone to shift. Like 2019 and 2020, Kapsabet Boys and Kenya High posted impressive results in KCSE. Let us cross our fingers, and see the outcomes of KCSE 2021. As I look at my crystal ball, I see many schools that toiled and moiled coming up to break records.
All of us should know that with energy, synergy and strategy, any school irrespective of its level, can evince excellence and post peak performance in any year. Every school has the ability to shine like lucent light so long as the determinants of peerless performance are given the pride of place.
Albeit, deep within every child, there is that ravenous desire to join a good school. The same song also harps in the heart of any concerned parent. We are naturally engineered to gyrate and gravitate towards places we can easily access success. It is an intrinsic instinct that shall remain extant until Christ comes back to rapture the church. No wonder, in the years of yore, John Fitzgerald Kennedy sagely said, “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.”
Deep within the human soul, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached in one of his phenomenal sermons, there is the ravenous desire to lead the parade. He called it the Drum Major Instinct. The desire to lead the parade or be at the front of the queue. The desire to be heard loud and clear — is deeply rooted in us.
In the whole scheme of things, we should let our boys and girls know that all of them cannot fit in the so-called elite schools. We must help them know that places don’t make people, but people make places.
Getting the highly-coveted chance in a top-tier national school, is not a direct ticket to peak performance. We have seen some students who secure chances in the Ivy League schools, but eventually fail and fall flat. Some students even transfer to other schools because they think that the problem is always with the schools. They get to the new school, but again find it hard to do it, and to make it. I wish somebody can whisper this to them: A lizard in Africa, cannot be a crocodile in America.
The writer rolls out talks and training services in schools.
