Creatives will benefit from new curriculum

South Sudan should export mangoes, I thought as I sat on the banks of River Nile. I was in Juba for the launch of the new South Sudan competence-based curriculum.

The speed at which Nile was flowing, coupled with the launch of the competence-based curriculum, made me feel Kenyans are being overtaken by our the neighbours such as Rwanda which had launched and is now implementing its competence-based curriculum.

This year Winners of the Burt Award for African Literature from left Mark Mutali,Christopher Okemwa with Charles Okoth on September 25th at Kempiski Hotel. (PHOTO: WAWERU MURAGE/STANDARD)

I was glad when, on coming back, I found out that the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development had invited stakeholders to a workshop that would jump start the process of implementing our own competence-based curriculum as opposed to the current knowledge based system.

As a literary enthusiast, and therefore a creative, I really liked what the curriculum designers called “paths” and this is what made this year’s BURT Awards worth celebrating when the winners, Christopher Okemwa, Mark Chetambe and Charles Okoth, were feted at Villa Rosa Kempiski on Friday.

Okemwa was declared the overall winner for Sabina and the Ogre. Chetambe was the first runners-up for Names and Secrets and Okoth, the writer of High Tide at Shibale, was the second runners-up. The winner received Sh765,000 and the second runners up got Sh 425,000 while the first runners up took home Sh 595, 000.

The “paths” will provide for the general curriculum, which everyone will follow, and also offer an avenue for creative people to follow their dream careers, say in writing, acting, or reciting poetry. The system will fully recognise all that.

Two of this year’s BURT Award winners would certainly fit into the paths. Mark Chetambe, who teaches Literature at Kenyatta University has made remarkable contribution to the Kenya Schools’ Drama Festivals as a script writer, director and judge.

Apart from his award winning novella, Names and Secrets, published by East African Educational Publishers, he has written The Village Fool and Other Stories – an anthology.

Christopher Okwema, the author of Sabina and the Ogre, is a poet, a dancer, a playwright and a storyteller. Okwema is also the founder and director of Kistrech — a poetry festival that is usually held in Kisii County.

The abilities of Chetambes and Okwema might have been noted earlier  in school, but one would argue that they were only re-discovered by chance after years of hard work. Yet there are others like them who grew up on the persistent study-the-traditional-subjects-and-seek-employment diet, who will never be discovered. Their talents have been wasted!

There are those who were punished for exhibiting talent by teachers who did not know the power of such gifts. There are those who were declared useless by the current system of education and branded failures because they could not pull chemicals through a pipette or talk about Brazilian coffee! If implemented, the new curriculum will bring hope especially with its designers’ acknowledgement of the fact, through its motto, that every child has potential.

Surely, there is no Kenyan child who is useless or is born a failure — each one of them has a capacity to create and innovate.

Pablo Picasso said all children are born artists. The problem is how to ensure they remain artists once they grow up.

Sadly, the children of the last fifty years of our independence have had their talents brutally squandered by an insensitive system, which educated them out of their talents. The system made them scared of erring in order to get it right, by stigmatising wrong. No wonder we have few or no innovations as the ability to be original has been completely stifled by the fear of being branded a failure.

This is something that is foreign in say, literature where learners are taught that there is no wrong answer provided one avails evidence to support an argument. The focus on excellence in potential is what we should have preoccupied ourselves with instead of blaming teachers and children in case of failure.

Without doubt, children do not fail — it is the systems of education that fail.

The new curriculum, if implemented, will be an escape, for many gifted children, from education’s death valley, in which schools killed extraordinary human creativity.

What should be clear though is that, I believe that Kenyans have great interest in education but they do not have the same interests as the current and previous curricula have always assumed.

There has always been an erroneous assumption that  Kenyans rank all the subjects the same way starting with the sciences, then languages, and finally the arts.

Some people might argue otherwise but I think creativity, literacy and numeracy should be treated equally.

Why, if I may ask should Literature be integrated with English language, giving less importance to a weighty subject, and then teach it a stand-alone subject at the university?

This is a major mistake, like integrating Mathematics, Chemistry, Biology or Physics with language, because the learners are never well-grounded for further learning.

Chetambe and Okwema’s winning is a peek into what real life should be. It is not all about penning seminar papers which are still regarded as the high watermark of academic life, but putting creativity into learning and realising it through practice.

As David Njeng’ere, a senior assistant director at the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development observed, our education teaches say, about swimming.

The neophytes know all the theory about swimming and get certificates as first class swimmers yet they will drown even in shallow waters if they were to carry out practicals!

For us to realise practical scholars, like Chetambe and Okwema, we should adapt the new curriculum and its suggested paths.

However, teachers must be trained to spot, nurture, and value, the gifts that their pupils posses and not stigmatise them.

Pupils should be taught that traditional education and as such subjects can be a path to self-reliance but that, they can also grow up learning and practising what they love most.

This is the only way we can beat the ever-present academic inflation which recently demanded a certificate for one to get a job, then it was a degree, now it is a Masters and soon, PhDs will not be a surety that one will get a job!

Importantly, the designers of this curriculum and other stakeholders must ensure that what eventually is presented to the Kenyan child will stand the test of time, and the products will not be half-baked graduates.