How Kenya's education impoverishes families

Beneath the veneer of celebration by schools and candidates who did well in the two main exams of 2014, rage rivers of tears. If you listen carefully, you will hear the cries of the poor children; estimated at 274,000, who scored the indistinctive C– and below in last year’s Form Four exams.

For them, a door has shut and unless their parents have deep pockets to bankroll bridging courses and finally get them onto the parallel degree programmes, the future is indeed bleak. But it is not just their cries that should stir our collective conscience, but the fact that education, being the biggest investment parents make, is a contributor to the circle of poverty that is spreading across the country like wild fire. Why?

Simple, parents sell everything; livestock, firewood, bricks, chickens and do all manner of menial jobs to get their children to school. The saddest part is that most of the children are in schools that have never scored a B, meaning no student has ever enrolled for a university degree.

I know one such school in my neighbourhood; the notice board displays results for the last six years and the majority falls in the C and D categories! Now imagine what goes on in the minds of the teachers and children in these schools; they seem to have an unyielding feeling of failure, even before the exams start.

But every term, parents pay fees, even if it is only meant to get their children to leave home at the beginning of the term like the others. There is no discounting the fact that the Government, too, spends billions on education; most of which goes to teachers as salaries. No one can fault the Government and parents for funneling almost all they have to get their children an education, for, after all, we seem to have determined that the only ticket to survival in this man-eat-man society is to get a good education.

Which is perfect because as they say; if you think education is expensive, try ignorance. I am sure you found yourself in my situation a few weeks ago, trying to explain to a Standard Three child that there are living microorganisms in the river and pan water that cause diseases such as dysentery, cholera, typhoid and diarrhea.

Whatever language you use, the only thing they know is that a living organism is visible and all others are myths.

Now you can imagine how the country would be if there were 40 million of these unfortunate characters around.

Granted, there are people who missed out on school but are astute business and family managers. They are not paupers and they have on their ‘Shylock’ list graduates and other characters endowed with white-collar jobs.

One could argue that life isn’t fair and there will always be the lucky and unlucky, the haves and have-nots.

 

In my village, when you raise such issues that have no perfect answer, the older generation will show you their fingers and point out that like humanity, they are never the same.

Yes, there will always be victors and losers, but as we celebrate those who conquer the exams and berate those who lose, there are several factors we should reflect about.

First is the uneven nature of development and equipping of our schools. County Governments have used devolved funds to address some of the shameful acts in the villages, such as mud-walled classes with no electricity or water.

But as a matter of urgency, it’s necessary to decide whether we need all the secondary schools that we have or whether some of them should be merged and quality raised through what business experts call the economics of scale.

Yes, we can boast of having thousands of schools, some within metres of each other, but is it logical? They add onto our cost base, because they each must have a separate set of teachers. Surely, even if our population is still sky-rocketing, indeed the proliferation of schools, mostly at the behest of politicians out to widen their ‘CV’ on development, has outpaced enrolment.

The other thing we need to examine is why every child in high school must be a boarder, because if all that parents were paying was tuition fees, then the fee burden would be less.

The process should be made voluntary, especially for those who have to do odd jobs such as cutting wood or selling chang’aa and busaa to get fees for their children.

You can imagine the number of children who drop out because of our skewed thinking that they must be boarders.

The other factor we must confront is the conspiracy web that leads to cheating in exams and subsequent cancellation of results.

This year alone, 2,900 candidates, including whole schools, had their results cancelled.

Now just sit back and imagine what this means for poor parents who had to sell chickens to keep their children in school.

Cruel indeed it is, and those behind this crime must be locked up in prison for their contribution to the spiral of poverty.

Finally guys, let us restrict the number of private commercial colleges out to issue untrustworthy certificates and mint cash, and increase the number of Government-run middle and technical colleges.

This is the only insurance against the cut-throat competition for university space, where those who missed out are treated like scoundrels and consigned to poverty.

   

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Education Families