An old mama who didn’t have an opportunity to school once remarked after attending a day long educational workshop: if you ain’t an education just think. To this old mama an education that doesn’t nurture thinking in a student is wanting.
To her education should be a process of acquiring knowledge and skills to overcome one’s contextual challenges: academic theories acquired by the students should be put into practical use to triumph over hunger, climate change, environmental degradation, bad leadership, and poverty.
Yes, such an education should be deep and wide enough to respond to the intellectual needs of a student as it bequeath one with an elastic and dynamic mind to respond to daily evolving challenges.
Analysis from the K CS E reveals that every passing year, 50 percent, of the candidates register a D+ and below, every passing year, this phenomenon seem to have prompted the ministry of education to consider the introduction of alternative B – packaged with simpler general sciences and mathematics among the 6,000 public schools without adequate laboratories. But, there are mechanical traditions, isolated facts, sedentary structures and disjointed tasks to be overcome to moot an appropriate educational curriculum.
We need an education that has a potential of exploiting individual student potential, talent, hobbies, and personality: Addressing institution of learning as individual identity -from the backdrop of their locality, occupation of a given people, student’s population, its status in equipment and facilities, learning materials and teacher to student ratio.
We urgently need an education that will prepare its graduates notwithstanding their national examination grade score or diploma/degree pursuit who have the passion to acquire and search new knowledge and skills, new methods of approaching old problems in the scientific front, chat a new mind in the political arena, able to inject realism into the social fabric, ignite entrepreneurship in approaching unemployment, and innovativeness and creativity in technological endeavors.
This is possible if our learning, teaching and examination will be out there to mold thinkers rather than reflectors of other people ideas. Students should be reflective enough to read to understand, sparing no ounce of devotion and effort to toughly understand their area of interest, as they will be able to fly high enough to spot what has not been discovered and innovated, transforming challenges into opportunities.
Such students will love to drink knowledge from its springs, source - investing their precious time in reading books – which have the potential of stretching the mind to higher grounds and horizons. This will give into being new ways of observing the world around us, formulating new questions into reading, looking things from sight into insight.
In this path, education will have a new meaning in our understanding. Research findings will find their place in the formulation of policies, knowledge acquired in our class rooms will be channeled into daily living, students will be exposed to realize the place of formulas, theories and laws in mathematics and science to engineering how they are the threads that weave industrialization. Yes, students will appreciate different subject offered in our schools from languages to arts, social sciences to pure and applied sciences, technology to engineering; as they complement one another into a meaningful whole in end products and services.
This package of education calls for courageous teachers who along side admitting that they don’t have all the answers to the questions that will a rise in their subject of instruction will enable the students to understand that what they are learning today, might be proved otherwise or might be rendered obsolete tomorrow.
To such teachers, their calling is a vast challenge to prepare students with a depth of mind to reason from facts to reality, cause to effect: students who will personalize what they learn into their contextual environment to improve on what they are learning.
With a sense that there are yet dozen of challenges to be met, scientific discoveries to be made, artistic work to created, technological innovation to be realized, old formulas to be improved, research to be carried out, unemployment crisis to be answered to, social living to be mended, physical life to be cared for, and spiritual need to be attended to – students should be left humbled to yearn for a character that will withstand such a great magnitude of real-life-demands.
Indeed, character development should be a nerve in our educational system that will not let truth and uprightness to be sacrificed in selfish desires. One educationalist has observed that ours is a generation where information has doubled, while knowledge – understanding that information – has halved; and wisdom – knowing how to use the knowledge – has quartered.
Yes, examinations will be viewed as a process of learning to be undertaken honestly and the pursuit of university education as a ladder that offers one a better overview into one’s area of interest and specialization. Students who cheat in examination prove their misunderstanding of the purpose of education – mental food stuff; and a certificate as a mere signature of knowledge, experience and skills one has accrued over the years of learning.
Kenyan education should transcend what is presently on the curriculum table, as much as we have to build on it – to offer something better and higher, beyond our present look out: An education in which future generations will anchor their prosperity with an eureka! “These were thinkers.”
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