Education, much like the law of nature, follows a distinguishing and succinct path. All of us are gifted differently which is why some children find it easy scoring an 'A' in mathematics but difficult to recite a poem.
Some students are best on the field but struggle in academic work. With this in mind, we should crystalise education to better help the child become a positive contributor in society.
Firstly, the purpose of education is to develop the mind (head), the heart (emotions) and the hand (body).
Secondly, every child can learn, but they learn differently, and at a different pace.
However, this is not the case given that during the years between 2000 and 2016 saw a serious degradation of our education, and the KCPE and KCSE mean score became the only thing we cared about.
We are already suffering an education that for decades, ignored values and life skills needed by our society. For instance, the Nairobi County Government (and other counties) spend billions of shillings cleaning streets and collecting garbage that is not in the bins, and repairing damage from vandalisation.
What we call massive corruption in government now, is essentially absence of values such as honesty and responsibility that cause death to our conscience and disappearance of sense of the common good of society.
While reports show massive productivity is lost due to traffic in our cities, a lot of this is not caused by small roads, but lack of values in our drivers, and absence of problem solving and critical thinking skills.
The Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) came to address these issues in 2017, but seemingly, still many teachers and parents struggle to understand why a different way of educating was necessary.
For instance, when a high-stakes examination was scrapped in the transition between Grade Six and Seven, many Kenyans complained and dared the examinations council to release the results and rank schools and children. Within months, we saw school ranks going round.
What we need to consider however, is that whenever the examination results are released, the country focuses on the 10 per cent favoured by the academic education, and ignore the cry of the artists, athletes and language gurus, pushed to condemnation by an exam that only considers the head.
The cameras never turn round to face them, and file their grievance against an education that condemns the majority.
Out here though, we tune our TVs to celebrate with Faith Kipyegon and dance with the musicians.
Recent research like that conducted by RELI in 20 counties in Kenya showed that on average, less than 15 per cent of our adolescents can demonstrate values and life skills proficiently.
For instance, only 9 per cent of them were able to solve problems at the highest level, which involved understanding a problem, and arriving at multiple ways of solving that problem.
Kenyan adolescents also performed worse than their Tanzanian counterparts on the value of respect, which involved putting oneself in the place of the other, and caring not just about yourself, but also another person denied respect in your presence.
What is needed is that parents and teachers support the nurturing of gifts and talents in our children, and support all efforts that help to balance the focus between the head (academic education, as well as life skills like problem solving), the heart (social and emotional competences like self-awareness), and the hand (sports, agriculture and the technical and vocational subjects).
If we move to this direction, it will be necessary to have examinations or assessments that also focus on other areas of life, so that we release results that represent the gifts and talents in all children.
The implication for values however is that parents, teachers and adults all over make effort to demonstrate these values and life skills, so that children can pick them. This way, we may change our society slowly, and lessen the frustration the young generation is presently facing.
The writer is the Executive Director, Zizi Afrique
