education, really????

For a while now I have been looking at the new Kenyan education system with much bewilderment. When my mother went to nursery school, for two years they went from eight to twelve to play and sing songs, and maybe learn a bit on how to hold a pen and stuff. The real education began in standard one. In my day, we went from eight to three, to learn how to write in the morning, then sleep and play after lunch waiting to be picked up at three. Now I get it that with the advent of civilization and development, carrying with it massive traffic jams and hence the need to beat them, we have to make a few adjustments. But what is the price we are paying – our children?

Picture this: It’s Tuesday morning. This family lives somewhere in Nairobi, it’s not important where; the difference more often than not is the same. The school bus passes outside the house at exactly 6.00 am, and hence Junior must be ready and on the bus-stop by then. Mum had to wake up before five to ensure that by this time she too is ready, having attended to the kids and dad so that she goes on to work as she drops off the child at the bus-point. Junior threw a mega-tantrum this morning, and who can blame him? He got home at 9pm last night due to the rains that resulted in unbelievable traffic hold up. He had homework which he had not touched, so he had to do that. Then dinner, shower, getting tomorrow’s shirt ironed, polishing them shoes… before you knew it, it was 11pm, and he was still about. I would be quite disagreeable come five am and the alarm, how much more this eight year old standard two pupil?

I grew up in an estate in Mumias. School was a ten-minute walk away, we came back home for lunch and actually had time to play. Matter of fact, I lost my shoes once, as we played on the way home, and my mother whose sense of teach-a-child-a-lesson-they’ll-never-forget was sharper than anyone I’d ever known, made me go to school barefoot. But it was easy. I woke up at 6.20 to be in school by seven, when we got older and it was 6.15, I woke up at 5.45. By 5.45 now, a child in baby class is at a bus-stop waiting for the bus. What then? Is it any shock we’re treating ulcers in six-year-olds?

 Don’t think that I’m recommending school mashinani, that we should all move from town. Even in the rural private school I went to, things have now changed. They now get to school by 6.00 am, for morning prep, then break at 5pm for tea and stuff, and then go back for night prep till 9.00 pm. Night prep, where a teacher comes to class and continues to drill more knowledge into their already saturated brains and then leaves them homework. To do at home, at 9.30 when they get there.  Education, no, slavery, maybe a little. I’m excited by the Mutula moves now, children need a break. But no, parents want to hire private tutors, transforming home into more comfortable school. So now, the child hates the holiday as much as the school term, home as much as school.

What is this you want to tell the child between 7 pm and 9 pm, that you didn’t manage to say during the day? Even if that child is a candidate. We want to hide behind candidature and the exams, when in essence all we are masking is poor planning. Don’t get me wrong, I am a staunch believer in the last minute policy, but if a teachers’ strike happens in 3^rd term and we are panicking that children will fail because of a three-week glitch, someone didn’t plan properly. I had the pleasure of going to a good public secondary school, where by the end of June all syllabi were completed, through holiday school and third term, we just did papers upon papers. And you really don’t need much from teachers; they are there to answer the questions we couldn’t. And they were not many.

I have nothing against teachers, or students, or the government (at this time ;))))) it’s the system. It’s okay if the ones affected are adult, we can manage, even though just barely, but our children, they are caught in the middle of circumstances too complex for them to understand and process, they have no say, they cannot speak out. We tell them to count themselves lucky because they are driven to school, that in ‘our days’ we walked 5km every morning and evening with no shoes on. They should not complain. But while their mouths are mum, a lot more speaks out to us, we can see the results. We see it in the infant mortality rates, despite the advances in medicine. We see it in the growing rate of childhood cancers and ulcers, in the increasing suicide statistics in children, in the college drop-out, truancy and delinquency rates.

There’s got to be a better way, surely, or else our future is bleak at best. Unless this crop of adults invents a way to live forever.