Kenya education system has for long been for the privileged few, and has thus been one major cause of inequality.
It can't be replaced with another distorted system. Being a tool of equity, education must be for human development. It is disingenuous for any worthwhile government to engage in crooked blackmail of critical workforce such as teachers rather than listening and deliberating to resolve their issues amicably. That is how a sensible government does. Kenya’s schooling system is fundamentally bifurcated or a dual education system. The first being the well-resourced, wealthy independent and former are for poor families, largest part of the population. The second schooling system catering for poor, predominantly rural and urban poor pupils, and being the majority of public schools, existing along a continuum of under-resourcing and dysfunctionality.
Education is one of the most effective methods of ending the poverty cycle many countries find themselves trapped in. It drives prosperity and growth and the lack of it drives inequality and instability. In 2015, the UN Sustainable Development Goal Four was established to help all governments strive towards inclusive, equitable and quality education for all children by 2030.
The right to basic education is one of several socio-economic rights in Constitution. We must respect the prioritisation of the right to basic education in our constitutional democracy and this must be reflected in policy and planning. The current funding model promotes inequality. We need a public process to review the existing school funding model. Over the years, there have been different norms and standards for school infrastructure, for Learning and Teacher Support Materials. We need to establish benchmarks or standards for quality education in all areas of education resourcing. Further, we need an efficient and functioning system of education. To do so, corruption must be weeded out of the profession. We also should ensure there is a culture of teaching and learning in schools and where it is not happening, strong measures to address this must be put in place. Finally we need to imbue the teaching profession with the integrity that the profession deserves and requires.
Uhuru Kenyatta regime should, therefore, stop imposing new education system before addressing pertinent questions. The vision of the World Declaration on Education for All (Jomtien 1990), to which Jamaica is committed, supported by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child is that: All children, young people and adults have the human right to benefit from an education that will meet their basic learning needs in the best and fullest sense of the term, an education that includes learning to know, to do, to live together and to be. It is an education geared to tapping each individual’s talents and potential and developing learners’ personalities, so that they can improve their lives and transform their societies.
The Dakar Framework for Action, re-affirming the vision set out in Jomtien in 1990, expressed the international community’s collective commitment to pursue a broad-based strategy for ensuring that the basic learning needs of every child, youth and adult are met within a generation and sustained thereafter. The Dakar Framework articulated:
Starting from early childhood and through life, the learners of the twenty-first century will require access to high quality educational opportunities that are responsive to their needs, equitable and gender-sensitive. The right to education imposes an obligation upon states to ensure that all citizens have opportunities to meet their basic learning needs. Primary education should be free, compulsory and be of good quality. The education systems of tomorrow, however diversified they may be, will need to be transparent and accountable in how they are governed, managed and financed. The indispensable role of the state in education must be supplemented and supported by bold and comprehensive educational partnerships at all levels of society. Education for All implies the involvement and commitment of all to education."
Finally, it is important to emphasis that the new education change faces irrelevance unless it bridges the gap between how students live and how they learn. Students will spend their adult lives in a multitasking, multifaceted, technology-driven, diverse, vibrant world and they must arrive equipped to do so.