In 2003 the Kenyan government introduced free primary education, with the intention of extending the benefits to secondary schooling. With the free primary, class sizes in government schools averaged more than 40. This opened the avenue for more private lessons; business people began to exploit an obvious market opportunity, offering private lessons on the side. This practice became so pervasive that most urban students and some rural ones resulted to private crammers in addition to regular schooling.
Private tuition devours a large portion of household spending in families with school-age children. A big reason why families are willing to spend so much, is that the education system relies heavily on national exams, not only for rating students but also for placing them in the various secondary schools and eventually faculties of the state universities that still account for most of college enrollment.
Primary education has increasingly become private education which has led to children only mingling with people from their own socioeconomic class; children raised in slums can only blend with fellow slum dwellers. The result is that the affluent and those of modest means live increasingly separate lives, and the class-mixing institutions and public spaces that forge a sense of common experience, competition, and shared citizenship have been eroded. Unless people from different backgrounds encounter one another in everyday life, it is hard to think of people as engaged in a common purpose as a nation. Kenya’s fledgling democracy requires that citizens’ share in a common life, this is how people learn to negotiate and tolerate differences, and care for a common good.
The government guarantee of universal education has become a false entitlement for the poor: the education available to them is of such poor quality as to be of little real benefit. A major culprit in this failure is a model of social service delivery that has reflected and reinforced social, economic and political inequalities since education used to be the sole vehicle for citizens to break the poverty cycle.
Private primary schools have mushroomed everywhere offering varying quality of education. But fees at most schools cluster at the upper end, irrespective of quality. And on average, they have been rising in the past 10 years. One would expect with availability of many school choices the costs would come down due to competition but that’s not the case, this is because education in Kenya is a status good which means parents are willing to pay high prices. Furthermore, there is a herd mentality which has led to fees being driven up by those at the top of the market rather than being pulled down. This attitude is made worse by the annual KCPE ranking which only incentivizes students, teachers and schools in general to cheat. The remedy, I think depends on more information being available to ensure accountability and transparency for people to weigh all the options.
The curriculum is mandated by the ministry of education alongside the choice of books. This has opened the situation to a host of problems, like corruption due to the lucrative nature of being able to monopolize reading material. With government deciding what should be taught and grading, the teachers’ authority and initiative is usurped. In schools, as in other Kenyan communities, students and teachers conform to the dominant culture of poor leadership, wealth worship, dishonesty, and easy solutions.
Schools are meant to be social institutions as well; where children are exposed to diverse groups of people thereby enriching their experiences. Many poor and middle-class private schools have no physical space to accommodate extra-curricula activities; sports and drama are not available to these students. This is an all round low quality education.
Why has this situation persisted on? It can be explained by the fact that parents have little influence on school operations, and the people who do have a different agenda than maximizing performance as measured by accepted standards. For example, donors and government ministries are concerned with attendance numbers only, and while it’s laudable to increase literacy levels it shouldn’t be at the expense of quality and standards.
As our other institutions, our universities have not kept their curriculum up to date, in the 1960s and 70s universities were few but their standard was excellent; a legacy of Kenya’s directed development history which emphasized funding university education because it would supposedly contribute more to development i.e. industrialization. With population growth and education demand there was a push to boost numbers without necessarily expanding capacity. Unsurprisingly, the quality offered has fallen drastically. By the 1990s class sizes in public universities grew. With student numbers in several big state universities up to six-digit figures, hundreds of students were packed into lecture halls. Furthermore, under President Moi (chancellor of all public universities) many lecturers were detained or fired and some immigrated to other countries if they espoused views contrary to orthodoxy.
A tertiary education that’s well conceived provides invaluable benefits for the youth and the country. It offers one a chance to acquire knowledge of opinions and events that helped shape their nation and also an opportunity to study other peoples cultures. A free democracy assumes that people are informed, capable of distinguishing public interest from private interest, can evaluate consequences, and discern claims of justice and opportunities for realizing them in politics.
Unfortunately, apart from school textbooks, most Kenyan households do not read books, and most families do not read any newspapers or magazines. Of those who do read, most concentrate on religious subjects. Perhaps more encouragingly, the youth use the internet, and most have read articles on the web. But, religious fare and entertainment were the favorite subjects, followed by sports, and only distantly by scientific subjects and topical issues.
To cater for the large college intake, humanities departments have been expanded. These departments need not invest in infrastructure; parallel degree programs in public varsities were added-on to cater for increased demand and to supplement government funding. But they too specialize in arts, humanities and or business.
Kenyan universities use to emphasize the study of classics, a legacy of the elite British system but in the 1990s there was a change of curricula which emphasized practical subjects. This was great except for the fact that no investments were made to accommodate those needs. The change relegated general education to the background while creating ever more disciplines. The current approach of making every discipline unique to others, limits the body of knowledge open to students. Alongside this, is the fact that religion, literature, sociology, political science etc are handled as individualized studies creating a class of graduates with no grand general theory to guide and draw from, this doesn’t create experts nor an intelligentsia class.
The ministry of education has suggested several reforms which basically restructure the education system to the old system (British), but this won’t fix the quality and standards problem. Infrastructural investments are the key, but so will be parents, teachers and other relevant stakeholder involvement. Teachers should be at liberty to apply best practices in teaching (borrowed from various societies), government should loosen it’s hold on the sector (curricula, text books etc), teacher training and certification, continuous assessment should be instituted alongside system overhaul.
Basically, parents and students should have good choices, teachers and other providers should have the right tools.
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