WHAT OTHERS SAY: The education mess, it’s time to act

A few days to Christmas, Cabinet Secretary for Education Fred Matiang’i released the results of the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examination results – and they were met with uproar.

The performance was appalling. A staggering 87.79 per cent of the candidates — 540,428 students — scored between grade C and E. Only 70,073, about 11 per cent, qualified to join university.

In 15 of Kenya’s 47 counties, not a single student made into the top 100 best scoring candidates in the exam.

Matiang’i was unmoved. Ever since he became Education CS, the flood of top scores has become a trickle. He says, with some justification, that the problem is not that there is a problem in Kenyan education today. It is that in the past the system was corrupted and too politicised, and students who should have failed passed with glowing colours.

Now that he has got rid of the rot, we have a true picture, and therefore can meaningfully fix the problems. Kenya is facing a very African problem. Whether in South Africa, Nigeria, Uganda, education is in the gutters. Matiang’i’s way, though, is better than the Tanzanian approach.

Faced with mass failures, not too long ago Tanzania came up with the ultimate political and bureaucratic solution; it lowered the pass grade sharply! One of the few countries on the continent bucking this trend is Rwanda. Recently The East African reported a strange story happening in Rwanda.

Almost everywhere in Africa, private schools are much better than government ones. However, in Rwanda, government schools have got so much better, parents are taking their children out of private schools to the public ones in record numbers. Private schools are closing or facing closure.

They decided to appeal to the government for a bail out, or essentially to go slow on improving state schools, so that they too could get some business! That is the thing; when there is an overall improvement in the quality of education, it tends to wipe out the gap between state and private schools.

The clamour over the quality of education in Kenya, will unlikely lead to dramatic improvements. To appreciate that, the point needs to be made that in Rwanda, the real reason the sector has improved is not because of investment in education in education as such. If we go back a few decades, this was the case everywhere. Today, there’s probably no African who went to school (primary, secondary, and university) between 1960 and 1980 who is not ashamed of the wretched state of their school.

In the first 25 years of independence, there were overarching and emotive reasons to invest in education. We needed to build a cadre of leaders, managers, bureaucrats to take over “our things” from the European colonialists. The fruits of independence couldn’t be secured without education.

In that sense, people didn’t go to school to study. They did so realise African dreams of freedom and nationhood.

The way we frame education today, children go to school to study, and maybe contribute to the economy. The arguments are about quality and how appropriate the curriculum is to producing workers for a modern technological economy.

By contrast, take some time and watch discussions on education on American TV. There are a lot of people whining about how US education is falling behind, and threatening the country’s “global leadership”.

The world’s superpower of the future, China, on the other hand is retooling its education, according to those spooked by its rise, for “world domination”.

The bigger crisis with education in Kenya and elsewhere, is that there’s no articulation of a grand reason for it. Governments are thinking like parents, who want their kids to get an education, find a well-paying job, become independent, bear them grandchildren, and take care of them in their old age.

For now, Rwanda is different. In 1994, it descended into the worst genocide the world had since World War II. It failed spectacularly, and most of the rest of the world just held its nose.

The motivation to overturn that narrative, and rub an indifferent world’s nose in its triumph, remains a powerful goal that fuels many of Rwanda’s achievements. However, it also creates a dangerous blind spot to the pitfalls in that drive.

Still, for now, the rest of us haven’t found an equal big cause. Until we do, we won’t fix the education mess.