Normally, examination results -whether KCPE or KCSE - are defined from two extremities; the victors and the failures.
Society will hail the victors and condemn those who have failed in almost equal measure. This dichotomous grading has induced a great fear of exams in our children. Having panicked, they enter examination rooms with sweaty palms, and sometimes with suicidal thoughts.
In 2011, a senior Professor at Macquarie University toyed with the idea of abolishing exams at all stages.There have been other attempts to abolish exams, but the grounds given have been flimsy.
Examinations are good. They enhance learning and are a means of identifying unique skills in students which later inform their choice of fulfilling careers. The greatest challenge has been how society (those not taking exams) treat examinees.
This is an apt example of a societal mold - an unjust judgment that society places on fragile minds at a formative and probably most vulnerable stage of life.
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Society nips many flowers in the bud, the reason we end up with passionless professionals.
Let us jog our minds by asking this question; Is there such a thing as passing or failing of exams? Objectively speaking, one can fail an exam. An exam gives pupils their net worth – they reap what they’ve been sowing over the years.
Exams show them their strengths and weaknesses – which is what defines one anyway. The society needs to ruminate about the results and help these young, unique minds soar to their professional careers; some which may go against the wishes of their guardians.
That ability
Exams try to give a mirror image of who a pupil is. While you can be ranked on a scale amongst your competitors, you can never fail an exam for a simple reason that an exam is never meant to be failed or passed but to overtly give a measure of covert abilities in as far as academics are concerned. Life isn’t all about classroom academics.
Your abilities might be hidden elsewhere, and your task is to search for them to get the nature given competitive advantage. Love that ability passionately, refine it as a profession and enter into a lifelong marriage in a fulfilling profession.Society can have a strong grip on us by way of long established cultures through which we are enslaved in casts that don’t conform to our anatomical features.
This in a way suppresses our free being that we all are created to be; free to discover our niche-our happy destinations in life. Every human is uniquely created by God and comes with matchless endowments.
These are traits; that the societal molds smother by comparing the incomparable through exams. We can never be an Obama, a Mandela, a Cicero or a mother Teresa in as much as they maybe models the society would wish cast their children into.
Yes, they accomplished great things, surmounted higher mountains in their specific circumstances, but we cannot be their replicas.
The contemporary societies are Pharisees and Seduces incarnate. Good at formulating many unrealistic standards and imposing them on their children in total disregard of their special endowments.
Loath failure
God in his wisdom has created a special niche for each and every being that is borne of a woman. All they need is to be given a favorable environment by way of life skills.
This in a natural test tube will mix, cross pollinate and cross fertilize with the genetic traits to yield a hybrid that has never been seen before. Society has peddled a falsehood that failure is bad and success is good; when in the real sense; the two are phases of the same journey.
The two are inseparable, but we have forcefully put them asunder and created a subjective scale within which to applaud one and vilify the other.
We have glorified success so much that our children loath failure when there is no such a thing as success or failure.
Show me a successful person who has never tasted failure and I will show you a living example of a hypocrite.
To the pupils who are being told they have failed exams, that is a falsehood; gird yourself with the hope that success lies not in those marks, grades and averages assigned to your name but in what you will do with what you have gotten. If they throw a lemon your way, make lemonade.
Use the results to re-examine yourself and as a strategy for the next phase in life, not as an end by itself. Use the results to adjust your sails in the direction of the winds that blow towards your destination; you are still very young with a lot awaiting you, don’t despair.
Dr Othieno is a veterinary doctor based in Nairobi - jotheino43@yahoo.com
