When I joined the law school, I was an ardent debater. I critically argued and added my emotions to back my points. My lecturers, then, argued that I shouldn’t add emotions to my arguments. They reasoned that emotions are not healthy for informed debate. Today, I want to make a point to everyone about our education system that I find hard to divorce from my emotions. Mariam Kamwaka (many of you may not know her), a 17 year old, is now referred to as the late. She rounded a matress string around her neck, tightened it enough to stifle her chords, calculated the distance required to break her neck and painfully strangled the breath out of her life – she hanged herself. Kamwaka went through the same torture Saddam Hussein suffered, the same torture we prescribe for treason,rape and terrorism, some of the most heinous of crimes the society cannot afford to live with. The gravity of death, its effect on loved ones and the mere idea that you will be lifeless after it were all factors Kamwaka took in. What was her crime? She had been forced to repeat Senior Three class. The audacity of this education system, to deprive us of not only freedom but conscience and now life! Kids are being forced to wake up at ungodly hours to be drummed into a syllabus that says ‘if you cant fix all these in your head for the exam, you’ll never make it in life’. Parents are being forced to take on the inhumane of tasks looking for the hyper-inflated figures of money that are paid as school fees only to wake up to news of their daughters and sons’ deaths. We must get ashamed of this, we must, if all efforts fail, choose to abandon this monster called formal education! I find it hard to accept that after four years of gradual studying of how atoms exist or don’t exist, I am required to sit in a two hour exam to determine whether I learnt that crap! Kamwaka is gone, we cannot bring her back to life but we can save the thousands that continue to live in this system!
Posted on: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 14:42:57 +0000
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