There's a Broken Promise in the Kenyan Education... Let's Mend it!

“You can be anything you want to be, if you just try hard enough…”

In early 2010, I got plenty of time in my hands and so I decided to join a gym in the lower side of Nairobi city center. Naturally, I have no muscles. My arms are weak and I cough like an old tractor under any form of pressure. But I had bought into this idea that I could develop strong and large muscles with a six pack to match… if I worked very hard for a year or two. I hit the gym hard. I ran the treadmills for hours to strengthen my cardio… lifted weights to build my biceps and triceps… did push-ups, squats, roll-ups… name all those things folks do in gyms to get perfect. After 24 months of intensive training, I felt very healthy but I didn’t have muscles and most disappointing, I had no six pack! This could be an isolated tale about a lazy me who couldn’t train harder to get what I wanted… it really is easy to say I didn’t work hard enough… or that I quit too soon. Inside the same gym there were men and women who went through the motions effortlessly and built huge muscles and donned rock-hard six packs in no time!

But mine is an idle story compared to the stories of millions of young people who come out of our school system with nothing but a badly broken promise! Our country is particularly numb with this silly piece of advice that we keep hearing in school assemblies across all counties of the land.

If you work hard at it, you can be anything that you want be…

No. You cannot!

People in academia are oft to believe this hollow rhetoric than most and it is for a good reason. They are clever… and they think they are clever because they worked hard. They forget that they are the designers of Education as is currently experienced in every classroom in our failing education system of choice. They excel because of their gift… the gift of good memory. Only a handful of the world population is gifted in this manner. The rest are gifted in a thousand other different ways but which the clever have not bothered to test in their education designs. So you’ve heard them come down heaviest on the education reform conceived by people they consider not ‘clever’ and accuse the reform of letting learners get away with mere talents as opposed to hard work! They claim that the reform is driven by business… and that’s why it has proposed that learners pursue paths that nurture their individual potentials. They continue to insist that a learner has to read Chemistry and Math and History even if the learner’s time would be better spent reading Dance and Performing Arts and Football. So they are offended by the reform. They are livid.

Now when we, as a country, set off to reform our public education, there were two reasons for it (in my view). The first one is economic. We were trying to work out "How might we educate our children to take their place in the economies of the 21st century?” Our schooling is expensive. Parents invest a greater part of their lifetime earnings in their children’s education with the hope of a later greater return. We would be foolish not to think about how we could build skills for learners at the basic level that would enable learners to create possibilities for themselves and their communities. The second reason had to be cultural. We have a broken sense of community as a country and this is a fire that has been fueled by our “first past the post” approach to education. We celebrate academic giants (measured by the depth of their memory) and forget “number two and below.” What that has achieved for us as a country is a bloated sense of importance for academic grades to the extent that all our school goers are often willing do anything to be celebrated! Our politics is even worse… a mine field so to say! And our politics is the way it is because our education feeds it. The reform answers a key question here: how might we educate our children so they have a sense of cultural identity and so that we can pass on the cultural genes of our communities while keeping respect for self and others at the center of all learning experiences?

I understand those who believe that a mistake has been made by focusing the Basic Education Curriculum Reform Framework on competencies and intentionally giving learners a voice and a choice of pathways at an early age. In my view, the new curriculum takes away control of education from the 'clever' and creates the possibility for all learners to demonstrate what they know and what they can do. They have lost an important voice in their control over what our children will consume. They designed and conceived the current system of education in the intellectual culture of the enlightenment, and in the economic circumstances of their time. It is okay for them to alienate millions of kids who don't find any inspiration in going to school as it is all about one skill… memory. The broken promise of education is humongous and cannot be mended by the same strategies that created it! It was the same clever people who promised us that if we worked hard and did well and got a college degree we’d have a job. The generation of our kids won't believe that, and they'll be right not to, by the way… it’s not true! You are better having a degree than not, but it's not a guarantee anymore, and particularly NOT since the route to a degree marginalises most of the things that I think are important about our children: their talents, their grit, their humanity, their sense of community, their responsibility, their creativity… a long tiring list of many other things.

They say we are lowering the standards by allowing kids to focus on their strengths rather than their weaknesses. They say if your child is struggling understanding Avogadro’s principle or Pythagoras theorem… make him or her work hard! Make him or her focus on that weakness at the expense of the great artist that he or she already is! That kind of reasoning was driven by an economic imperative of the past! What we must remember is; running right through this thinking was an intellectual model of the mind, which was essentially the enlightenment view of intelligence - that real intelligence consists in the capacity for certain type of deductive reasoning and the knowledge of the classics - what we'd come to think of as academic ability. And this is deep in the gene pool of public education that there are already two types of people: academic and non-academic. Smart people and non-smart people. And the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they're not brilliant because they're being judged against standards of the ‘clever’… of memory… of recall… of regurgitation… of hard work!

Overcoming deficits is an essential part of the fabric of the academic culture; books, movies and folklore are filled with stories of the underdog who beats a one-in-a-million odds. And this leads us to celebrate those who triumph over their lack of natural talent even more than we recognise those who capitalise on their innate abilities. As a result, millions of learners in our schools set their sights on conquering the subjects that fail them, after all our national history is replete with stories of top achieving academicians as the epitome of the dream for a successful life! People who have worked hard, they say, have become whatever they wanted. Haven’t rivers taught us something else? The water follows the path of least resistance and cuts a deeper river channel. How then do we believe that attempting something that is naturally difficult for us at the expense of one which is easier could be more rewarding? No! You cannot be anything you want to be – but you can be a lot more of what you already are.

Those pathways some folks keep denigrating in blog posts do offer the slimmest opportunity for our children to mend the broken promise of Education.

George William is a Teacher of Children, Teacher Trainer, Human Centered Designer, Certified Digital Money Practitioner, Education Policy enthusiast and the Founder of Unmuted Classrooms.