Why CBC means complicating basic components of learning, just to sound different

Cabinet Secretary for Education Prof. George Magoha speaking after breaking ground for CBC classrooms at Obuolo Secondary in Kisumu County. [Washington Onyango, Standard]

I helped with homework earlier in the week. The task, like many aspects of CBC nonsense, was unnecessarily couched in very difficult instruction. The task was to craft words with “double constants.”

I asked the young man of the house if he knew what a double consonant is. He did not and it’s a safe bet that even high school students wouldn’t know what a Grade One pupil is expected to.

So, I Googled “double constants” and showed him a page, relevant to his age, with words that have double spellings. Noon. Knee. Pool. Pull. I broke down this “consonant” business to simpler terms that the young man could grasp. His granny, who is more plugged to early childhood development, was even more exasperated, when she came calling recently. She went through his work each evening with a growing sense of frustration. She could not, she said time and again, map specific learning outcomes from the exercises.

Even more frustrating, writing on scraps of pages online meant there was no way of monitoring progress on basic literacy matters like handwriting.

I am persuaded that Education CS George Magoha embodies the failure of CBC. He can hardly maintain a conversation without issuing threats, and lacks the humility to admit he might not have all the answers to the world’s problems. That, perhaps, would be anathema to his training, or should we say, lack thereof?

Magoha is not to blame for CBC, he did not invent it; it’s the way he is implementing it, without a conversation about obvious challenges.