We must move fast to salvage falling education standards

Events in these past few weeks have raised numerous questions about where we, as a nation, are going in matters education. PHOTO| FILE| NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • A conveyor belt of PhDs, most of whose owners cannot boast of any robust academic research, innovation or noticeable presence in decent peer-reviewed publications.

  • If these are the people to be entrusted with teaching our undergraduates then this country has already lost the war against functional illiteracy.

  • Now we have semi-literate “graduates” who cannot string together a sentence of English and who have absolutely no idea of what is going on around them.

It is possible that without education, life would be simple and therefore a lot more enjoyable. But then there would be little difference between human beings who have to plot and calculate every step of their existence, and animals that have no need to think of anything at all even if they had the brains to do so. But human beings are endowed with brains which must be trained because they cannot, like beasts, survive on instinct alone.

DEFECTIVE

That is where education comes in. It differs in several respects from the training given to dogs, for instance, which can be taught to attack, fetch, lie down and hunt through various permutations of a very narrow reward-and-punishment regimen. You cannot teach a dog to think on its own but with human beings you can and you must, for survival demands it. We go to school to learn how to think and the best people to teach us are those who are experienced in the pursuit of knowledge.

It is my firm belief that with the exception of those fellows who are congenitally defective, everyone has a brain that can be sharpened. The average human being is neither a genius nor a moron; most people are somewhere in between. The critical difference between them is in the way they imbibe, analyse, categorise and employ the knowledge they acquire, and this depends on how they are taught. It also depends on their attitudes towards learning.

Events in these past few weeks have raised numerous questions about where we, as a nation, are going in matters education. The first was the mass failure of graduates training at the Kenya School of Law. According to reports, of the 1,572 students who sat for the bar exams last year, only 308 made it. Here we are talking about students who have studied law for four years, been admitted to the Kenya School of Law, and then failed the all-important examinations. After almost six years of study, this must surely be heart-breaking.

Many theories for such mass failures have been bandied about. One of them is that the trainers at that institution deliberately fail the students so that their papers can be re-marked for which the students have to part with Sh15,000 per paper, or they can re-sit the exams for which they have to pay Sh10,000.

CHEATING

This rather heartless commercial aspect needs to be reviewed urgently. After all, most of these folk are still living from hand-to-mouth, and they shouldn’t be made to feel as though they are being punished.

On the other hand, maybe whoever is looking at this issue needs to go right to the bottom of the whole mess — the way the potential lawyers are trained right from their first year at university. Are these institutions really equipped to offer the very best legal education? Are their lecturers up to the task? Are the students themselves up to the task? This last point is, in my view, the most important, for maybe we are starting at the wrong end.

Three years ago, Dr Fred Matiang’i cracked down hard on national exam cheating that had become so rampant at both primary and secondary school levels that nobody had any clear idea of who should go on to secondary school or to university. This may sound mean but it would not be too far-fetched to reason that these folks who are lamenting today are the products of an education system that had broken down, and a huge number did not deserve to study law in the first place. There is a crying need to overhaul the whole legal education system to ensure such huge investments in time and money do not go to waste.

The same goes for the second scandal that has hit this country in recent times — that of PhDs. I personally have never aspired to such lofty heights in my academic career, but in circumstances where these institutions are mass producing PhDs that are indefensible, maybe I am better off with my modest attainments.

CONVEYOR BELT

The question is this: Are Kenyans becoming cleverer by the day or is there something totally amiss? This question became stark when there was a howl of protests after a local university awarded 118 PhDs at a go, 89 of them in the Humanities.

Other public universities were not left far behind, and a clear picture starts to emerge: A conveyor belt of PhDs, most of whose owners cannot boast of any robust academic research, innovation or noticeable presence in decent peer-reviewed publications. If these are the people to be entrusted with teaching our undergraduates then this country has already lost the war against functional illiteracy.

This brings me to a recent experience that left me completely befuddled: Semi-literate “graduates” who cannot string together a sentence of English and who have absolutely no idea of what is going on around them. I can’t dwell too much on this issue, but one thing is clear: Our educational standards are plummeting at a mind-boggling pace. We can blame the inimical influence of social media all we want, but that’s a poor excuse for an Arts graduate who cannot name the president of Nigeria or who believes Abdel el-Sisi is an inclusive noun for a man and his buddies.

Mr Ngwiri is a consulting editor; [email protected]