Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention. —Neil Postman.
Sometime in 2016, the former principal of Alliance High School, David Kariuki, lamented that students in high school students would rather be at home than at school.
That was the recurring answer he got from students whenever he asked them about where—between school and home—they should be whenever he had posed the question to them in a school assembly.
Kariuki raised the issue when the then Cabinet Secretary for Education, Dr Fred Matiang’i, met national schools' principals regarding proper administration of national examinations free from corrupt behaviour.
Most of the principals agreed with Kariuki’s observation. The anecdotal explanation for students’ attitude was that most children these days come from middle-class backgrounds.
The argument was that, unlike their counterparts more than 30 years ago, the current generation of students has better diets and better accommodation back home compared to what the school affords them. Hence, their wish to be at home at all times.
Students’ preference for their homes over school is not unusual. A home, for adults and children alike, needs no justification. We all feel the transcendent value of a home when we are at home and away. It is a place of warmth, comfort and affection.
It doesn’t matter whether there is enough or balanced food or ample sleeping space at home. Warmth, comfort and affection are what all humans, children especially, hunger for before they begin to appreciate tertiary needs and utilities.
There is no other institution, however well-endowed in human wants and needs, that can replace home. Nor does the need for those things other institutions provide suspend the enduring need for warmth, comfort and affection in the learners and adults.
Education policymakers the world over acknowledge this fact. Education policy, curricula, standards and the administration of examinations, for instance, provide for the safety, comfort and welfare of learners.
It is the reason why the Ministry of Education stipulates certain things school administrators must do or comply with to ensure that teaching and learning take place in a school climate that meets certain specifications.
In general, school climate refers to the quality and character of school life. It is its heart and soul. In essence, this is what determines whether a child and a teacher will love the school and look forward to being there each school day.
It is important to have competent teachers, curriculum materials, classrooms and hostels—if the school is a boarding school. However, it is important, perhaps more important, that learners feel comfortable, safe and appreciated—all their idiosyncrasies. There can be no optimal learning without these. They are basic to any meaningful learning experience. The irreducible minimum for learning.
Making the school a happy place is as worthwhile a pursuit as implementing a national curriculum.
The Basic Education Regulations 2015 makes certain stipulations—profound by any standards—that provide for a school climate that has the capacity to make learning warm, comfortable and stress free.
The regulations stipulate that learners attend official teaching between 8am and 3.30pm with an extra hour and 15 minutes afterwards for games and club.
The regulations have demonstrated faith in learners to conduct self-directed learning by providing for preps between 7.30pm and 9.30pm, Monday to Friday, for learners in boarding schools.
Implied in this regulation is that learners should be in their dormitories by 10pm—for bedtime which should last from 9.30pm to 6am. And 6am to 8am has been provided for supervised routine activities.
Weekend is for general cleaning of the hostels, classrooms and the compound with preps slated for 10am to 12noon for boarders.
Adherence to this means students will have ample time—outside the official 8am to 3.30pm for class hours from Monday to Friday, to have their personal private time and private space to prepare, to go through what teachers have taught, in effect consolidating their personal understanding of the basic ideas and concepts in the curriculum.
There is a need to trust children from a very early age with independent study, perhaps arranged in school, but which takes away from the institutional setting. Learner-centred education or instruction is that which enables teachers to thoroughly prepare their lessons and offer quality instruction experience to learners.
Students learn in such a school climate. They are attentive and focused. They take advantage of every class period to learn with meaning. Things don’t pass their ears, as my late grandmother would say.
We need to recognise a school climate where each learner—particularly those in grade four all the way Form 4—have a chance to develop private uniqueness and self-reliance.
That is what Competence Based Curriculum stands for. That is what every education system worth its salt is all about.
CBC is actually rooting for quality educational experience—and that experience is directed by the learner under the intelligent supervision of the teacher.
Such an educational experience will provide children with private time or private space to learn. To explore.
Such an education experience will provide the necessary balance between teaching, learning and testing. It will, when holidays come, ensure schools release learners to go home without prevarication. They will not burden students with holiday tuition or unnecessary school work where the students are asked to make copious notes for syllabus content they have not been taught.
Such an educational experience will nurture a school climate that is, in the words of former President George H Bush, a “kinder, gentler” school system across the length and breadth of the country.
Then learners will have a minimum of seven hours of sleep at school. They will have time for games, for washing clothes.
They will have time to think not just about what they are learning and its applications in life; they will also think about who they are and how they can make themselves better men and women going forward. They will have time to read class readers and also—for Form 3s and 4s—setbooks. They will read widely—meeting the very essence of quality education anywhere.
They will also have time to talk to their peers about their families, their dreams and frustrations—away from the obsessive preoccupation with syllabus coverage that blights their other equally important developmental aspects of their lives.
This will cut down the boredom that endless teaching engenders. These moments are therapeutic. They help release stress. They will not burn anything combustible when provoked.
Take these and other associated things into account, and the students will not say that they would prefer to be home when they should be in school.
Instead, they will say they prefer being in school at that particular point because learning has meaning beyond grades, beyond examinations, beyond a career. That they are finding school life fulfilling in its own right.
Communications officer, Ministry of Education
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