Promote STEM with more vigour than Humanities and Social Sciences

Another five-year electoral cycle is coming to an end with the same speed as the rapidity with which changes in the education sector are being proposed and promulgated. Since independence Kenyans have dreamt of a technological Valhalla land equalling, if not better than, the best in the world. The reasons we have missed the target for more than half a century are as many and varied as the hues of our wildflowers. But chief among them is the singular lack of a unified national vision and a recurrent malaise of misplaced priorities.

Technological goals are attainable when a nation has a clear understanding of what it takes to get there. It must also have the human and material resources to implement a program of educating, training and mentoring its youth to meet the challenges presented by a transition from a backward third world country to a fine-tuned and smoothly-running developed nation.

Short-sighted political ambitions and a lack of a national psyche has been Kenya’s main undoing in its endeavour to reach technological maturity. Like one of those broken vinyl records of yore, the needle seems to fall back into a specific groove whenever a regime change occurs. Each political regime wants to impose some fangled education system by which it hopes to be remembered in posterity. Education, in general, is part of a never-ending continuum and not a start-stop gadget we in Kenya and the rest of Africa love to imagine.

Immediately after the 1964 Ominde Commission and egged on by the Tom Mboya-J F Kennedy ties, efforts were made to fast track Kenya into the technological stratosphere by replicating the Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) programs then in place in the United States. These programs were developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a response to the Soviet Union’s apparent superiority in the late 1950s Space Program.