Meritocratic education is the missing link in our broad agenda

It’s an article of faith that the country that out-educates others will out-perform the rest in all key areas of socio-economic activities. In today’s world, social escalator begins in the first grade classroom and progresses through other classrooms for many years before emerging into the “real world”. Knowledge is the new gold and just like gold, demand far outstrips supply. As they say in football, “You are what your record says.” A look at the academic records of our students in universities, middle level colleges, secondary and primary schools in recent past years show we are far from appreciating this basic fact.

The latest is the shocking revelation of the Commission for University Education (CUE), that the nation’s 63 universities have “133 useless courses with a cumulative capacity of 10,000 students”. Is this not a major climb down of the universities from the expected rarefied peaks of great modern education system, to the troughs and plains of every day below average pedestrian culture? For sure our education system has serious problems with quality and relevance. The students need better education. Better education may be defined as an education that nurtures young people to have better values, self-confidence, to be critical thinkers, be effective communicators, to be creators and creative servers. An education that inspires all Kenyans to start something new, to add something extra, or to adapt something old in whatever work they are doing.

University education is simply more than pursuit of certification. Every college course culminates in an examination and a grade, and to the award of diploma or degree. That is the certification which is merely the validation of the knowledge and skills mastered during the course. The feedback we normally get from the market place is that colleges put more emphasis on certification rather than on education, thus, the commercialisation of college certification and the present craze for “unearned, fake degrees everywhere”. Universities are public intellectual resources. They must be used prudently for public good. As for our secondary schools, their failure rate of the KCSE exam is at best depressing. When out of 660,204 students who sat the KCSE exam in 2018, only 90,744 or 13.74 per cent got C+ and above, something must be terribly wrong. Failure rate of 86.26 per cent! The KCSE exam results of 2017 was not any better. I am personally familiar with the education systems of about 59 countries across all the continents. I am not aware of a single nation that has got such depressing level of failure rates at an equivalent level of education.

On the other hand, a college or a school is not an island. If we want our institutions to be world class, we should be more instrumental in supporting them. In matters of education, we should go the bottom up approach. We have to reset the country’s education system and think of the world as one big classroom being graded on a curve that is going up every other year. If we want better teachers and meritocratic world class students, our political leaders should become better, effective educators. Finally, we cannot exempt our young people from responsibility for their own success and those of their communities. No one can eat food for them. Students must free themselves from the present day “social media craze” and spend their time well to master their subjects. Achievement in school matters for a lifetime. We have a big problem and we need an equally big, effective response.

– The writer is strategic management consultant in Nairobi