Home
|
Beyond the Success of Universal Free Primary Education |
|
|
|
|
Written by David Onunnda
|
|
Saturday, 09 December 2006 |
For about four years now, public primary schools in Kenya have not been charging school fees. As may be expected, the free primary education policy has put Kenya in the space of international education policy discourse.
This is because Kenya is one of the nations that are making good progress towards the achievement of the second of the eight Millennium Development Goals that requires countries to ensure that all their peoples have the chance to complete a full primary school cycle by 2015.
However, as with every good initiative, the free primary education policy has generated its own challenges, which demand more than cursory attention from education policy makers in Kenya. The disproportionate student-teacher ratios, inadequate facilities, and insufficient secondary school spaces, are just but some of the challenges that policy makers must constantly deal with as a result of the increased Gross Enrollment Ratios in our public primary schools.
The free primary education policy has also elicited a most robust debate amongst many Kenyans, in the past three years, regarding the quality of education that is offered in our public schools. Some have made generalizations, albeit erroneously, that just because enrollment in our public schools have increased tremendously since the free primary education policy came into force, it follows therefore, that the quality of education in these schools must be low. Evidence both at home, and from other countries such as Pakistan, show that this belief is not necessarily true ?and that increased enrollments, if well handled, may not necessarily impact negatively on the quality of education.
Yet it still is important to ask whether the education that our young people receive adequately prepares them for the dynamic and severely globalized world of the twenty first century. What competencies, for instance, do the graduates of our school system possess? And how do these competencies compare to those of graduates of other education systems across the world?
At the core of this quality debate are the perennial twin educational issues of content and pedagogy: Is the curriculum we teach in our schools, at the moment, equipping our children with the skills they will need to compete for opportunities and make meaningful contributions in a global setting? Do we teach that curriculum in ways that encourage inquiry and a sense of intellectual curiosity among the pupils? These, in my opinion, are the real issues that education planners in Kenya must now turn to as we consolidate the gains already made by the free primary education policy.
It is time to take the bold leap from glorying in figures of increased enrollments alone, and address matters of quality and relevance. We must especially, as a nation, rethink the position of science and technology at all levels in our education system. We must cultivate in our children the fundamentals of science ?inquiry, critical thinking, discovery and innovativeness from an early age.
We must therefore cease to divorce science and technology from the realm of education, making it something that is extraneous to the ordinary classroom experience, and that is only accessible to the gifted few. The overarching goal of our education system must be to produce, at all levels of schooling, a pool of intellectually curious minds ?people with the zeal to create.
In order to achieve this, we must train and equip all our teachers with the capacity and capabilities to bring science and technology alive in all subjects of study and in all classrooms. The teacher must help her pupils see the relevance, and apply the principles, of science and technology in her geography lessons, in history lessons, in art lessons, in science, and in all other subjects. In other words, inquiry, curiosity and discovery must be part and parcel of the classroom experience in all subjects ?not just in science. This clearly calls for a rethinking of the way we train our teachers and the way we plan and implement professional development programs for teachers already in the classroom.
At the same time, the ministry of education must now focus on creating more opportunities at the secondary school level in order to accommodate the envisioned huge numbers of primary school graduates. It is wrong for us to every year play witness to tens of thousands of youngsters, barely fourteen years of age, drop out of the school system because of insufficient secondary school spaces.
Tertiary institutions must equally be expanded, strengthened, and made relevant. Such institutions must produce people with broad-based and relevant skills to serve in the various sectors of the economy, especially in agriculture. Indeed, the recent controversies in the tea industry should be a bitter reminder to us all that what Kenya, like the rest of the world, needs, is skilled manpower that will easily embrace the use of machines ?and not be declared redundant when firms mechanize. This is why it makes sense to revitalize the polytechnics.
There is now a great body of research evidence pointing to a direct positive correlation between investing in the expansion of post-primary education, and economic development. The South East Asian countries that have developed rapidly in the past few decades have done so by investing heavily in education, especially at higher levels of schooling. This is the way Kenya must go if we are to realize more rapid and sustained economic growth ?for countries do not develop by having universal primary education alone, but by training highly skilled manpower in all areas of scholarship, and then creating frameworks to meaningfully use such skills!
Trackback(0)
 |
|
Last Updated ( Tuesday, 12 December 2006 )
|
|
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form