Why boarding schools will not be abolished anytime soon

Kakamega High School students were sent home after a dormitory was set on fire. [Benjamin Sakwa, Standard]

The debate over whether boarding schools or day schools are better is as old as the history of education in Kenya. For years, boarding schools have dominated this debate with their polished, elitist arguments, and mostly succeeded in making day schools seem like lesser institutions.

See, the biggest problem with our boarding school education system is not just that it is colonial, although it certainly is. Our boarding schools still carry the colonial relics of fellows like Carey Francis and the missionary educators who believed young African boys and girls should be removed from their parents and raised by institutions.

But that is not even the biggest problem. The biggest problem with our boarding schools is that they have become forced relocation camps where parents send their children to grow up.

Perhaps, after years of parenting, parents become so exhausted that they want someone else to take over. So we continue to retain boarding schools as institutions where other people continue raising our children for us.

But the other sad truth is that the average school dormitory in Kenya is a disaster waiting to happen; a juvenile jail-metal grills and all, congested, poorly ventilated, with tens of students sharing one broken toilet and surviving for months on an R&B (rice and beans) diet. Yet we continue escorting our young boys and girls into these overrated death traps every new term to be locked away for months at a time.

Because the truth is, we will not ban boarding schools anytime soon, no matter how many young lives are sacrificed therein. We will not ban them even though teachers themselves, through their unions, have called for an end to a system that the government has failed to police.

We will not ban boarding schools because doing so would inconvenience everyone except the children. It would inconvenience thousands of tenderpreneurs who mint millions from the boarding school industry—suppliers of everything, from air to tissue paper. It would inconvenience the contractors — the same fellows that put up the death traps in the name of dormitories.

It would inconvenience politicians and powerful individuals who garner prestige and political mileage from building and launching badly designed, poorly built dormitories that are nothing more than personal monuments?

It would inconvenience the powerful head teachers whose wealth, reputations, and influence have been built around large boarding schools, and most who have become little more than licensed kidnappers that send parents ransom notes every term to demand payment for one thing or another.

More importantly, we will not ban boarding schools because they are status symbols: A parent who sends their child to a day school is deemed poor; their child is a second-class citizen compared to one who attends a boarding school as far away from home as possible.

We will not ban boarding schools because it would force learners from the rich and the poor under one roof in the neighbouring day school, and threaten our class system that boarding schools subtly enforce.

Why-even teachers teaching in our day schools are regarded as lesser than those teaching in the boarding school next door. Despite holding similar qualifications, the ‘principal’ of a boarding school in Kenya struts around with a greater sense of entitlement than their counterpart in the day school next door!

Yet the sad truth is that nearly all boarding schools in Kenya are potential crime scenes.

And before we quickly forget the charred remains of the children curled on the smouldering metal beds; before we forget the blood-curdling screams quickly silenced by the choking, poisonous fumes, we must examine our collective conscience and confront one question: Are we willing to let more children die simply to preserve a system that benefits everyone except the children it purports to protect?

For parents, the following truth, though disturbing, must begin to sink in: That day you bought that metal box, packed your child's belongings into it, and sent them off to a boarding school that could not guarantee their safety (and certainly could not guarantee their happiness) you took a gamble with your child’s life.

The writer is a public communications and media consultant. [email protected]