Kenya’s Education Culture Needs Radical Transformation

Alex O. Awiti

The exam-centric education system we inherited from the British colonists has
created a workforce more adept at imitation than innovation. A radical change in
Kenya’s education culture is needed to foster the human capital necessary for
innovation- led social and economic transformation.

High scores in Kenyan Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) determine the quality
of the secondary school a student will be admitted to. Private primary schools are
notoriously famous for these super-high scores. A majority of students who ace the
KCPE examinations, most of who are from well-to-do urban families, gain admission
to top-flight public high schools. An inordinate proportion of students from these high-
test score secondary schools eventually get admission into engineering, law and
medical schools in public universities.

Teachers in both primary and secondary schools, under pressure to maintain their
schools’ scoring record, teach to the test and organize extra classes for exam drills.
Most public high schools in Nairobi that were historically day have been converted to
boarding schools, ostensibly to sequester and then drill any form of imagination and
playful inquiry out of young learners.

Parents ferry children as young as primary six to school on the weekend for extra
tuition. In most urban schools, and some rural primary schools too, classes begin at 7
am and end after dusk. In both public and private schools holiday tuition is
mandatory. Amidst pressure from long school days and onerous homework, the
Kenyan student’s most intellectually demanding work is memorizing mind–numbing
facts for regurgitation.

And it gets even better. On a designated day, just before the start of the national
exams, parents and teachers pack churches and school assembly halls with bended
knees and beseeching hearts to pray for divine wisdom.

The product of this educational culture is deficient in the inquiry, investigation, and
analytical skills needed for scientific and technological innovation. My experience
while teaching 3rd year undergraduate engineering students at a local university was
uninspiring. While their motivation and effort was impressively high, these “A”
students were atrociously weak at seeing connections, synthesizing information,
extrapolating ideas or generating hypotheses. This may suggest that the Kenyan
education does not nurture problem-solving and analytical skills required for
innovation.

The education system we inherited and nurtured faithfully over the last five decades
was designed to give Africans basic education and not tools and skills that enable
critical thinking and problem solving. The goal was to mass-produce literate but
unthinking underlings to serve the colonial administration as manual labourers and
career civil servants. And I think it has achieved its goal. My sense is that Kenyan
students, graduates, and I dare say educators, are adept at absorbing existing
knowledge and imitating existing technology.

It is not possible to deliver a critical mass of analytical minds and leaders of

innovative solutions needed to realize the much-hyped vision 2030 through the
current education system. A robust transformation of the educational culture must
happen before homegrown Kenyan innovation, not imitation, can challenge scientific
and technological dominance of the west and increasingly, of the east. However, the
larger tragedy of the failure of our education system plays out in research, both in
universities and public research institutions. Kenyan–based scientists, without
Western collaborators, seldom publish in high impact factor peer reviewed journals.
But to be fair to Kenya, it is helpful to note that no African country (except South
Africa) or Asian country is represented among the top 20 journals, ranked by the
average number of citations in every published paper.

Kenya has for a long time recognized that a critical mass of entrepreneurial
researchers is required to sustain research and encourage innovation. Since the
famous “air-lifts” of the late 1950s and 1960s, Kenya has sent and continues to send
some of the best students to North America and Europe for training in science and
technology. Those who return, especially to public universities and research
institutions, are seldom valued for their initiative and creativity. Instead they are
sucked into the bureaucracy, often to managerial positions that demand nothing of
their high education and specialized training.

Education reform needed nurture a new generation of characteristics and abilities

among young learners. I believe students, at all levels, should be taught using
problem-based and enquiry–based learning. This approach will develop their powers
of investigation and critical thinking. Student grades should depend on active
contribution during group-based learning and problem-solving sessions, to change
the focus from competitive examination to collaborative learning.

The fundamental goal of education reform must be to be to situate learning in the life
of the student in a manner that enables intentional learning, stimulates critical
thinking, promotes problem solving and deepens opportunity for innovation.
Ultimately, the key to reform in education is a curriculum that emancipates the
Kenyan children, liberates them to play, explore, experiment, discover, reflect and
doubt. Hence, unleashing the full complement of human ingenuity and creative
capacities of every sort, which must be the source of our collective resilience.

Dr. Awiti is an Ecosystems Ecologist and works with Faculty of Arts and Sciences of the Aga
Khan University in Nairobi