Enough with programming Kenyan children in the name of 'education'

8-4-4 death knell! Was the headline for Monday’s paper - a testament of the education system that has been vilified for a long time.

I am a product of the system and have taught within the system for more than a decade. I often wonder, is the system the problem or is it the direction delivery of this system has taken?

I remember going to school until 12:45pm when I was in lower primary and up to 3:45pm when in upper primary. No school on Saturdays and holiday tuition was something my mother threatened me with for bad behaviour.

Today, the age of joining school has been lowered to as low as 24 months for baby class, school days lengthened and the banning of holiday tuition was met with protest from many of the stakeholders in the education sector.

We have moved from teaching for life to teaching for examinations. Narrowed our vision and turned the focus from the children to the institution.

Teaching is now for the laurels that a school gets once it emerges at the top and we are sacrificing our children at the altar of institutional pride. Students and pupils are drilled and programmed like automatons; to pass KCPE, then KCSE. Education has become a war, the classroom the battle ground. Integrity and the intrinsic value of knowledge long dead victims. They must pass, these students, no matter what. Is it any wonder then that cheating has become so rampant?

We need to take a step back and look at what we are doing to our children. We are already limping from the epidemics of greed and corruption, and yet we are teaching our children that all that matters is the end result. And that the only acceptable result is to be the first, the seeming best, to have the most. The journey to the top matters little. Take shortcuts, buy your way to the top, it only matters that you get there.

What then is the way forward? I am of a practical bent. Change truly does start at the individual level. For a teacher to walk in the classroom and see her or his students as people not statistics. For that parent to re-evaluate their criterion for choosing a school for their child. To choose a school where their child will be taught values, and the true value of education.

It is only when we invest the right time and research into this, that the emerging shape of our future will be less crooked.

- The writer is a teacher at Starehe Boys Centre