Current crises in education now affecting all economic sectors

Vihiga County Education Director Alexie Muzame assisting PP2 students during a learning session at their institution on October 2, 2023. [Benjamin Sakwa, Standard]

There is a self-inflicted crisis of education in Kenya which, lacking philosophical cohesion, runs two systems - one for the elite called 'international' and the other for regular people called 8-4-4 and now renamed CBC.

The education system suffers the paradox of having schools with no teachers and teachers with no schools and manages national examinations shambolically. Its policies lack credibility and encourage external dictates.

There is a history behind the current misery in the educational sector that affects every other sector. That history has three broad phases in which the supposed custodians of society supposedly ensure that 'education' serves interests. These are pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial phases. While there was clarity of educational objectives in pre-colonial and colonial phases, confusion in the post-colonial times accounts for current crises in education and hence crisis in the country.