Degree not surety of great leadership

In an article published in The Standard on September 8, 2015, Kennedy Buhere, the Ministry of Education’s public relations officer, appeared to endorse IEBC’s move to impose academic qualifications on aspirants for political offices.

Mr Buhere argued that while Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln were not immersed in academics, their speeches and writings project them as men who had great knowledge and intellect that, in modern days, can only be found at universities.

He appears to have confused intellectual behaviour with the work of intellectuals and professionals.

Intellectual competence is not taught exclusively through books, and abstract thinking is not the exclusive domain of the academic. Intellectual competence can also emerge from experiences outside school, including interactions with family, peers and community.

Buhere knows the challenges our education sector faces. He has spared no time to support radical measures aimed at reforming the education sector to make it accommodative to the unprivileged in the society. To turn around and support IEBC’s move to fence off political offices to a select few, erases his legacy as a supporter of affirmative action in education.

Education in Kenya is about money. Children born into financially privileged situations are advantaged to succeed in schools and are primed for admission to elite universities through self-sponsored programmes.

On the other hand, Children not exposed to such privileges often have difficulties in school and less frequently attain high levels of academic and professional success. The unprivileged few who break out in academics irrespective of challenges do so through their own efforts or because someone charitable spurred the intellectual competence in them.

Take the case of two students from a poor and privileged background. If the former gets a B but one point shy of attaining the cut-off mark, his future is sealed due to lack of finances, whereas if the latter scores a C+, he or she will pursue a course at the university. Can we then say the one who scored C+ is better placed to be a future leader because he managed to get a degree?

There is no doubt on the role of education in entrenching national order and development. Education helps an individual to perceive critically, to explore widely, acquire knowledge and techniques of solving problems.

Education helps us to test ideas against explicit and considered moral values - to enable students recognise and create real and abstract relationships between concrete and imaginary phenomena. But does our education system impart the above capabilities?

In fact, the intellectuals who join politics and eventually win seats in the Government or land public jobs have not injected professionalism in the management of public affairs. Their conduct is no different from those who never went to school. When they comment on topical issues, they do so in defence of narrow and sectarian positions held by senior politicians from their regions. As such, the myth that the educated are better leaders is misplaced.

The intellectual abilities of our  future leaders should not be based on whether they made  it to university  when the education provided there is not reflected in specific attitudes, disciplines-based knowledge, technique, values and intellect to enable them adaptively and efficiently engage and solve both commonplace and complex problems.

Our assessment component and our conception of pedagogy in schools must then be directed at these abilities if we are to insist on university education as the qualification for running for political offices.

It is surprising for Buhere to say that the current basic education curriculum lays a firm foundation and promotes critical thinking.

Far from it, our education system does not help students attain critical orality; the syllabus reinforces existing stereotypes instead of posing questions that stimulate critical thinking.

The key to critical literacy is participation, which is full involvement   and exchange of ideas between the student and his teacher.

Today, the curriculum puts a teacher in a position of authority, leaving the student as a mere spectator and consumer of this knowledge.