Sossion has mistaken new curriculum

And it came to pass, that after three days they found him (Jesus Christ, then 12 years old) in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions. Luke 2:46 King James Version

Last week, Nominated Member of Parliament Wilson Sossion raised an important question on the proposed curriculum reform while addressing the members of the Kenya Primary School Heads Association (Kepsha) in Mombasa. Mr Sossion claimed that the competence-based curriculum whose implementation begins in Grade 1 and 3 from January is ideally meant for tertiary levels of education, and not for basic levels of education. “The idea of making learners competent in given professions at basic education levels doesn’t arise,” he claimed.

Implied in the Knut secretary general’s notion is that the competencies the government wants nurtured in the learners in the 12-year of basic education are professional skills that are suitable for post-secondary education and not for learner at basic education level.

This perspective of competence-based education is grossly mistaken. Education is all about development of the mind, heart, soul and manual or physical skills of learners. In educational jargon, it targets three important domains: Learners’ cognitive, affective and psychomotor skills.

An excellent education means nothing but adoption of a teaching instruction that develops higher order thinking: that is the thinking that goes beyond restating the facts and requires students to do something with the facts — understand them, infer from them, connect them to other facts and concepts, categorise them, manipulate them, put them together in new or novel ways, and apply them as we seek new solutions to new problems.

These are skills that make the difference between poor education and a superior one. They enable a student to continue learning and growing in life. It is these skills that eventually render the student independent of the teacher — a basic goal of any education worth its salt — beyond mere acquisition of knowledge.

The blueprint of  basic curriculum reform, prepared by the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development with stakeholders, defines competence as the ability to apply knowledge and skills to successfully perform a function. The blueprint outlines the competencies that it wants developed in learners as communication and collaboration, self-efficacy, critical and problem solving, creativity and imagination, citizenship, digital literacy and learning to learn.

These are important skills that is relevant to economic growth and development of any country given, among other factors, the growing information and technological society, globalisation and the intercultural nature of local and international environments, to say nothing of the rapid changes that are taking place courtesy of rapid flow of ideas, people and technology wrought by modern transport and communication technology.

Kenya has no choice but to embrace a curriculum with depth and breadth and teaching styles that will help students not only to master the content knowledge — comprehension — but also to manipulate the information or knowledge to solve problems or cope with and manage change individually and at career levels.

So, contrary to Sossion’s view, competence skills that the Government wants nurtured at basic education levels are domain-general thinking skills and not domain-specific skills. The Ministry of Education aims at infusing thinking as an explicit goal into the regular curricular — into every subject or discipline to provide the foundation for, among others, subsequent education and training in tertiary institutions and crucially in the workplace.

The writer is a Communications Officer, Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, Nairobi. kbuhere@education.go.ke