To destroy a society, just kill trust in its education potential

Students during a past graduation ceremony. [File, Standard]

It is continuously becoming harder to have a straight path to success in Kenya. If we do not work to clean our systems, beginning with the educational system, we will end up with a completely broken-down society where no one believes in process. When people lose faith in the process, the alternative is short cuts, and that mostly means activities that disturb the civil order: Con games, corruption, heists.

I say this on the background of the disturbing news from the School of Medicine at Moi University.

Who would want to be a doctor in Kenya if a course that is supposed to last 6 years ends up being a 9-year course? Yet, this is the sad reality of a cohort of students at the school. It sounded absurd, but it is actually factual that a pupil who joined Standard 4 at the same time as one who joined the university can end up being at the university at the same time.

Medicine is not just any academic course. This is one course that attracts the cream of our educational system. When you have an A student who led in his or her county ending up as a frustrated common villager, what would you expect of the rest?

The unfortunate bit is that this is just a tip of the iceberg of the challenges that a student of medicine will face before settling down as a doctor. It is only recently that we lost the young and bright Desiree Moraa while interning at Gatundu Level Four hospital. Her death brought to the fore the excruciating conditions that doctors have to work under before being officially licensed. Yet, the government still found it convenient to cut down their emoluments.

Ideally, if you are born into a poor family in Kenya, the easiest ticket to success should be academics. The best engineers, doctors, and public servants we know walked to school barefoot, went without meals for days, and walked around in tatters. Their emancipation from the shackles of poverty could only be attributed to one thing: they worked hard in class, went to university with government funding, and walked right into a ready job market.

Today, academic success only offers very temporary satisfaction. When you attend a graduation ceremony today, you get this ambivalent feeling that your excitement may not last.

Most of the teachers that have been serving under the government’s internship programme graduated over five years ago. For the two years of internship, they have been earning 17000 shillings! It is just a fluke chance that the new curriculum demanded additional teachers. But again, we all know how those slots were apportioned.
Kenya may not be baking a cake big enough for its citizens. However, even when the cake is small, there must be criteria that allow the most deserving to get it first. In our case, we have a small cake and a system that allows only those who can cut corners to access it.

When the public education system is in shambles, those in it end up last in line. And that is how a society goes down.

The writer is a communications consultant.