Some schools have created a belief that some children have inborn abilities for Art-based subjects while others have for an aptitude for mathematics and sciences.
Arising from this belief is that students who are good in either cannot be good in the other.
This belief has no educational basis whatsoever.
The foundation of our national education policy, curriculum and standards is that every child is educable and therefore, the state should develop the child’s powers—intellectual, moral and spiritual—to the fullest possible extent.
The policy is that the intellectual or mental capabilities of the child have the capacity to embrace all knowledge and skills—human and natural, and their application to solving problems and challenges of living.
This explains the broad curriculum and balance we see in primary to secondary schools.
A broad and balanced curriculum provides for a reasonably wide range of subjects and topics for as long as is possible for that child to learn; it promotes a broad range of knowledge and skills and allows children to discover and pursue their own particular interests and inclinations later in life.
The curriculum in question also provides greater learning space and widens students' knowledge base for multi-layered development.
So the attitude that prevails in some school cultures to the effect that there are some students fit to study and understand mathematics and sciences while others are suited for arts and humanities subjects is wrong.
The capacity to appreciate arts and humanity subjects on one hand and mathematics and sciences on the other are not mutually exclusive.
The capacity of the human mind to understand things is unlimited. Intellectual history is replete with famous people whose abilities embraced the world of mathematics and science on one hand and that of arts and humanities on the other.
In this pantheon are famous people such as Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, John Locke, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and many others.
Curricular in national education systems around the world are designed to expose the youngest children to a broad and ambitious curriculum in the hope of identifying one or more areas in which each child excels or is motivated to learn.
Prejudicing the children against one trajectory of the curriculum unforgivably limits the range of children’s potential.
Unfortunately, some school cultures have invented devious ways of making children, particularly in secondary education, lose interest in mathematics and the sciences.
Naughty students in senior grades spread a phobia for mathematics and science among lower secondary school students. Regrettably, some of the teachers of maths and science subjects spark an aversion in students to mathematics and sciences.
Both spread the idea that maths and science subjects are too difficult; that only real men (in a boys’ school) are the ones who can “crack the subject”.
The same misinformation circulates in mixed or only girls’ schools. Mischievous teachers send signals into the atmosphere suggesting that maths and sciences are for men. As a result, girls who could be having difficulties understanding not the entire subject but some topics, lose interest in the subjects.
Either way, students who had a fairly good foundation in maths and science from primary school, chicken out of the subjects.
Suffice it to say that we have lost many would-be doctors, engineers, surveyors, architects and technologists through this unprofessional behaviour.
The negative attitude the majority of students have had towards maths and sciences is partly contributed by adults.
We do it two ways. Firstly, through spreading the superstition that the two disciplines are like water and oil. Secondly, through deviously thwarting students’ interest in the sciences to enable us—teachers—to have less workload. This happens with optional subjects in KCSE.
All told, the object of mathematics is about natural phenomenon. It is not about objects in heaven or hell—where none of us has been.
The responsibility of a math and science teacher is to make students understand nature and the use and application of mathematical and scientific principles.
The teacher is assumed and must possess the depth and breadth fund of knowledge of mathematical and scientific principles.
Arts, mathematics and the sciences have a sphere of knowledge. All children need to have is good brains. Without a doubt, all if not a significant majority of all children have good brains.
This brain has a mind or an intellect with the ability to know and comprehend ideas when properly explained. The human mind has the ability to think conceptually and abstractly. Even small children think and think conceptually and abstractly but on things appropriate to their ages.
The arts and humanities properly understood require conceptual and analytical abilities. Maths and sciences require the same mental or intellectual abilities. The key to easing students' understanding of maths and sciences is the same key that enables them to understand arts subjects. And this is mastery of mathematical and scientific principles pedagogical knowledge—knowledge about the process of teaching.
A deputy director in the Ministry of Education, Dr William Sugut, told me that not so long ago, he had a debriefing session with a mathematics teacher after a classroom observation of a mathematics lesson.
“Why do you think the students in this school perform poorly in maths?” he probed.
“I think the students are weak,” Sugut recalled the teacher as saying.
“The children are weak in Maths but the same school with the same students produces 'As' in history?”
Sugut underscored a philosophical truth about education: the brain that gets an A in history has the ability to get an A in any other subject, including mathematics and sciences. Except for factors that have little to do with the child’s brain.
