By John Kariuki

A retired colleague who is now retired had a short fuse with nearly everybody.   When he boarded matatus, no conductor dared to insult or overcharge him for he would shed off all the dignity of a teacher and match them blow for blow in a verbal duel! Frequently, the touts would blink first. Needless to say, this man was a legend of sorts.

Many people thought him mad and dared not cross his path and especially by precipitating a row in public.

When given his peace, this teacher would be a symbol of calmness and manners associated with the learned. And if you brought up a serious debate, he would also come “up market” and contribute seminally.  Is he two people in one, a ruffian and a gentlemen all rolled in one like Robert Louis Stevenson’s classical double character in Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde?

But unlike this retiree, many learned people frequently have neither wits nor spontaneity of thought. Just pluck them out of their gregarious and sheltered lives and you will have the perfect example of beached whales! They are clueless.

Their apparent pomposity, precludes them from hitting back even in the face of personal affront. So, they are at the mercy of functionally illiterate “soldiers,” guards, who yell at them in banking halls and parking lots. They plead guilty along our highways when pedestrians and cyclists clearly break the Highway Code and cause accidents. Instead of toughening it out and waiting for the police, the learned often chicken out and pay hush money!

And the newest game in town is where young women, with only a modicum of education, are snaring learned men by begetting children with them. They then run away and sue for child support using our enthusiastic new constitution!

Captives to paradigms

This way, many hapless guys are getting their wages attached. The women are drawing an instant income and keeping their freedom to flirt and further their careers with other unsuspecting learned men!

   And the culprit in all these is our present education system. It makes us totally colourless and clueless. So we don’t think but are captives to paradigms and facts as suggested by brochures, the mass media, and “consultants” of all hues.

Our present education merely furthers the economic, social and political interests of foreigners, making us misfits in our own country. It is short on virtues and nationalistic ideals despite the many committees that have been tinkering with it since Independence.

If the lengthy queues at foreign embassies in search of travel documents is anything to go by, then there is something fundamentally wrong in what is taught in school.

The chief faculty used in the education system is memory. Anybody who remembers what the teacher says and reproduces it passes. He need not have a critical mind or ability to enjoy lessons. Idlers, or “psychological cases,” as they are causally dismissed in many staffrooms and common rooms, have healthy spirits and their wits around them.

They would rather watch grass grow than repeat tyrannical definitions and formulae after their tutors. What passes as “official stupidity” could as well be lack interest and sufficient motivation to study abstractions that have no basis in our intellectual and material culture.

Indeed, the narrator in Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino laments about educated people thus: for all our young men were finished in the forest, their manhood was finished in the classrooms.  Their testicles were smashed with a large book.

A human infant is born with a gigantic capacity to learn. In the first few years, children learn languages and many facts about themselves and their surroundings. Their curiosity is insatiable. However this opportunity for truly unbiased learning is only shortlived.

Soon parents stake their agenda, informed by their economic realities and personal experiences. If the child seeks forbidden knowledge or betrays a curiosity, he or she is promptly checked. Children are taught that certain ideas are naughty long before they acquire adult concepts of good and evil. The earliest misleading ones are about birth and the repression of anger and knowledge of sex organs.

School children are conditioned about lies and social habits which the foreign architects of our education demand. This subservience of minds began at kindergarten and puts entire generations to sleep through school and university. It is what Jogoo House and Kenyan Institute of Education must shatter if we truly want education to serve us.

For a start they could urgently create a Teacher of the Year Award in Kiswahili, the tool that will bring about East African unification.

Currently, many winners of this award are teachers of the English language, the imperialist tool that brought us where we are.

The writer teaches at Nyandarua High School, Nyandarua County.

kkariukij@gmail.com