The miseducation of Benson

A common refrain one hears from older people nowadays is how the standard of education has fallen from the supposedly high levels of their days.

This is a sentiment I regard with great scepticism when I compare the level of knowledge and elucidation of a young fellow in my house and my own when I was his age.

At only seven and in Standard Two, my son’s knowledge of the English language and other measures of conventional learning appears phenomenal to me, and that can only be testament to advances in the education system.

At his level, we were still writing on clay tablets in an improvised classroom in the wing of the local church built in the shape of a cross.

This was a great improvement on writing with fingers on the earthen floor in another improvised classroom in the other wing.

Instead of starting the week with class work as young learners do these days, our Monday mornings were mainly taken up by drawing water from a nearby stream to tamp down the dust and drive away the jiggers that infested the classrooms.

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The quality of teaching was also highly suspect.

In Standard Seven, when we wrote the examination that determined whether we proceeded to secondary school or dropped out to go and herd cattle for a living, my English language teacher was the school head teacher who believed that young minds had to be kept alert with a cane.

To this end, immediately he entered the classroom, he would move around briskly, tapping our exposed heads with a cane or a ruler. His lessons were mainly conducted in vernacular, and every so often he would recharge by taking snuff.

The little English language he used sounded not much different from the Kimeru, a heritage I am yet to wean myself off to date.

As a journalist many years later, this was to become a handicap whenever I had to interview people who did not share my ethnic background.

It caused some embarrassment when once I was assigned to interview an artiste from Britain for a column called Brief Encounters.

She had acquired her education in Eton and Oxford, she said. These are some of Britain’s finest learning institutions, but the first sounded strange to me because she pronounced it as you would ‘elephant’ instead of ‘eaton’ as I thought of it.

She had also studied ballet, which she pronounced barley.

I had just been reading a PG Wodehouse novel, in which the swear word ‘bally’, euphemism for ‘bloody,’ appeared often so the word appeared where ballet should have been.

For some reason, the editor allowed the blunder to pass through, and I still wonder what the lady must have thought of Kenyan journalism if she ever read the piece.

During these interviews, especially with the British, I entertained serious doubts as to whether what I had been taught by teachers like our snuff-taking head teacher was actually the English language.

From the blank looks that met some of my questions, I might as well have been speaking in a remote Kimeru dialect.

I also did not understand much of what they said and I am still mystified by many of the words that are uttered by people who claim English is their native tongue.

Which is why whenever I can spare time from my busy schedule, I always tune in to KTN on Friday evenings to be enlightened by Willice the Word master.

English language was not the only problem in my primary school days.

People in the village believed that the mathematics teacher at our school, a man who owned only one pair of trousers and two shirts, was so good that he dreamt in numbers.

Teaching us about momentum one day, he explained that owing to its larger weight, a lorry moving at 60 kilometres per hour will overtake a car going downhill at the same speed!