It’s time schooling was abolished

Schooling where the badge of honour for male college students is the number of girls from a ‘rival’ tribe one has raped in a year, where kids learn how to use drugs, experiment with their bodies is a process of anarchy. Schooling as we have it today should be abolished.

Before you lynch me, read Ivan Illich’s ‘Deschooling Society’. We may prevaricate, blame teachers or whoever, but all this smoky business in schools is symptomatic of an over-schooled society.

But there is a tiny minority of Kenyan parents that has abandoned institutionalised schooling. Their children learn at home and only sit for national exams. We may cite the Bill of Rights and the like, but their children have not become psychopaths.

I have been listening to some of those who have gone through ‘de-schooling’ and those who interact with them. I am getting the impression of well-adjusted individuals, unfussed by the social madness whirling around them.

Illich said that the proliferation of schools in the last 200 years has had the same effect like that of weapons, only less apparent.

There is a difference between schooling and learning. Schooling as we have today is much about the institutions and where packaged learning is doled out in bits, often in a hostile environment.

Learning is the acquiring of skills, which is a function of education. It does not have to be in an enclosure.
Need I add that current schooling is worse off for its emphasis on certificates, titles and the time taken to acquire them?

Globally, modern schooling has impinged unrepairable damage on the character of young minds.

Fox News recently reported that 1 out of 5 college female students in New York has been sexually assaulted. The biggest problem with the current schooling is that it is superimposed on largely broken societies, where parenting is rapidly weakening.

Placing kids barely out of diapers in hostile institutions is not much different from equipping them with guns.

Those brought up with little parental support know that tugging along life is like a rudderless ship out in deep sea, in strong winds without the captain.

I must speak for many young people who will have to forever endure the emotional instability throughout life because of weak parenting. We enrol children in schools at their most critical formative years between ages 3-7.

We pay peanuts to early childhood teachers, who are as clueless as the parents. For some parents, schooling is a substitute to parenting. These children may succeed in life materially and intellectually, but the psychological emptiness must haunt them through life. No school is equipped to undo this.

There are many ‘successful’ men and women in academia, business, politics, and religion. Yes, physically grown persons in their 40 and 50s who are nevertheless emotional adolescents trapped in adult bodies.

In Kenya, the negative effects of mass schooling began in the 1980s when children born during the state of emergency came of age.

In the state of emergency, banishments left whole villages without adult males. Many women had to bring up children single handed.

In the 1980s, these Mau Mau kids themselves became parents. Many later became absent parents too. Women learnt to live without men.

The cultural strictures were already loosened by modernism: school and career. Women now need men for the seed.Whereas our fathers, aunties and grandies would forever chastise, coalesce and cajole us to get someone with whom to ‘name me’, today, our young women are more comfortable dating much older men.

Before I could even tell the difference between elbow and shin, my uncle sat me down. “A time is coming when no girl will listen to you... they will say you are too old. Man, grab someone... even a wench!” he preached.

How time changes. ‘Sponsor’ is the new normal. But lassies looking for their grandfathers to have fun with are in reality searching for masculine responsibility so much lacking in our society; a society too broken to steel its young men.

Where I come from, there is a warning proverb: Families crumble when shields are placed on rooftops.
We are witnessing the final kicks of masculinity.

With this breakdown of parental hold on children and consequent social disorder, we should not then be surprised that children are burning schools for sport.

But crucially, we must ask: what are they communicating? School is a social creation not the other way. With a broken society, schooling becomes dangerous.

It merely enhances injurious values from the society and it is much like a hospital where people get sicker than better. Schooling cannot replace parenting. It is as good as the family.

Those calling for alternatives to institutionalised schooling point out that only a few formal schools should be retained to offer special skills that cannot be offered at home. And with all this technology, who needs schooling?