KCSE results are out and some parents and students are celebrating. But for the vast majority, the long bitter winter has started, and it will last a long time. They have been condemned as failures early in life. There are statistics on the best-performing schools and counties, but it will all boil down to a simple question: how did your son or daughter perform? The annual rituals of releasing exam results have occupied a central place in our national psyche. It’s usually a tense moment, a watershed for most young Kenyans. But should it be? Do exams really make economic sense? Beyond the statistics for top-performing schools and students is the need to reform our education system — after all, we reformed the Constitution, which was a bigger task. How can we attain Vision 2030 and implement the Constitution without reforming our education, the national thought process? What reforms do we need? First, we must redefine our exams. They seem to be used entirely to limit opportunities for young people. Instead, they should test the progress of our children so that we can assist the weak students and discover their other talents. Exam results indicate most students are average — a fact known to all psychologists. But we assume everyone is a genius and focus all our energy on the top 5 per cent. Exams perpetuate the scarcity mentality, and so successfully because it starts early. They make us view the world as narrow and divided; as fail or pass, there are no in-betweens. We take that beyond the classroom to workplace and our homes. That is why pessimism, instead of possibilities, is so ingrained in our national psyche. Exams are the genesis of one of our greatest economic soft underbellies: the zero-sum game thinking that we cannot both have something. Yet, economic reality has shown that the law of diminishing returns can be rendered useless by innovation and ingenuity. The thinking that we should emphasise exams less and focus more on students makes sense. We can train teachers to do that. Exams should energise the next generation, not depress it. If we cannot abolish exams, we need to give the Kenya National Examinations Council a competitor. Why is our thought process so monopolised by one examining body? To increase efficiency and spawn innovation, KNEC needs a local competitor, preferably a private entity. Don’t we have private hospitals that deal with matters of life and death? What would the Competition Authority say about that? Have we focused on which educational reforms transformed Singapore and other Asian Tigers into what they are today? After all, economic growth starts with the way a nation thinks. When we think of education reforms, we think of numbers like 844 or 7423. Reforms should focus more on what our children learn and how it helps them fit into the world, shape it and make their lives a success by reaching their potential. Lawyers had their time with the Constitution, it is now the educators’ moment.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Mar 2014 05:36:12 +0000