By Peter Muiru, Eldoret
As the honorable Minister for Education designs girls’ uniforms, let him also cut out for the newly appointed county education directors.
They should earnestly begin tackling the county’s’ education challenges for our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind not the length of the skirt is our fundamental resource.
For starters, the recent activities by communities in beating and harassing the teachers for poor results in KCPE (Kenya Certificate of Primary Education) should inform them of our society’s value for education.
To most of us, the public schools’ teachers get protection from people who were the last members of their families to attend them. It is unexplainable how a non pre-tested and non pre-selected class of pupils can all fail.
'Kenyanize' students
After ensuring that children are supported to the actualization of their potential, the education chiefs must de-tribalise them by developing a curriculum that ‘Kenyanizes’ students.
Some subjects being taught seek to justify and sustain ethnic violence as a fact while highly respected literature refutes such views and goes to a lot of depths to argue to the contrary. This literature points out in essence how violence is very largely determined through social learning and other non-genetic factors.
Concentrating on the parents' known past (historical injustices) and encouraging children to go for what was stolen and failing to point to them what is being taken away from them now (present and future challenges) continually links the child to the past.
Children should be discouraged from carrying out vendettas on their parents’ real and assumed historical injustices while in reality, a child’s threat resides in their life ahead.
Cost considerations
The directors must make education affordable to the lowest earners in our society. It is fundamentally critical that education costs be brought down. The inability of most low-income parents to educate a child stems from school extravagance.
Some of them having been school heads know of the disparity of the fees charged in schools even between fence neighbors with similar infrastructure and commodity prices. It is exploitative that students bring photocopy paper and textbooks to schools while the government is funding these expenses.
While schools are meant to offer business to the local people, that should not mean illogical and money-sucking prices. These high price quotations do not correspond to those offered to other buyers and the extra charge the directors should know which pockets it lines.
Easy prey
The schools must stop committing the little available resources in vehicle purchases.
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