BY VICTOR OCHIENG’
Immediately after the release of KCPE 2020, the Form One Selection and Placement exercise started in post-haste.
The outcome revealed that most pupils had selected high-end national schools without good guidance and careful counsel.
The Cabinet Secretary of Education, Prof. George Magoha, commented about it while delivering a carefully-crafted speech in the head teachers’ conference in Mombasa.
It was clear like crystal, that pupils erred a lot the time they did selection of secondary schools. For instance, some pupils selected three top secondary schools perhaps due to 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.
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.
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 do channel our focus on selection of the course, then search for the university that offers it. I also take time to educate them on issues to do with cut-off points and clusters 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 where tall buildings kiss the sky, and caress the clouds.
But our pupils preparing to transit to high school, sometimes are in 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.
That is why when they even matriculate in some schools, they refuse to settle. They remain stressed. Why? Because stress is caused by being here yet you want to be there.
Every girl who sat for KCPE 2020, yearned to be admitted at Pangani Girls’ High School, while every boy wanted to be at Mang’u School. One of my jocular friends told me that around ten boys applied for Pangani Girls’ High School. When I heard this, I just laughed with a lot of 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. 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 bright like light so long as the determinants of performance are in place.
In the whole scheme of things, we should let our boys and girls know that all of them cannot fit in the 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 elite 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 make it. I wish somebody would whisper to them: a lizard in Africa cannot be a crocodile in America.
America is not great because of the fame, name, stunning structure and infrastructure, but Americans themselves made it great and glorious.
