- Preparing students for the rigours of life that follow immediately after school requires consistent mentorship.
- This will help them appreciate their skills and grow to contribute economically and socially to the growth of the country.
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The implementation of the Competency-Based Curriculum is a game-changer in the quest to revolutionize our education, even as policymakers continue working on models to make it more effective.
As the old system is phased out for a more innovative substitute, initial assessments point to a sustainable path towards innovative education that will continually meet industry demands and meaningfully nurture younger generations.
For the CBC Curriculum to succeed and be embraced by students, targeted mentorship programs need to be looped into its conceptual framework.
Student mentorship programs play a key role in shaping attitudes, learning cultures, and nurturing skills of students from an early age up to the time they enter the demanding job market industry.
Strengthening the mindset of learners from an early age goes a long way towards ensuring they are better positioned to make important career choices and can comfortably settle within the local and global economic set-up.
Today, the growth of technology has brought about massive developments within society, including artificial intelligence and robotics.
Production, manufacturing, packaging, monitoring and evaluation can now be done with the click of a button or be scheduled using a computer program.
As such, the opportunities to do certain jobs decline by the day as robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) threaten to take over.
Notably, it is very encouraging to see our basic education model shift towards important aspects of human development such as training sessions in emotional intelligence, communication, project management, entrepreneurship, critical thinking and leadership.
Highlighting and stressing these, among others, will be key in our journey towards having our younger generations embrace innovative education.
Consequently, accelerating this will depend on the quality of mentorship programs we have for our young ones and how effective they are.
Policymakers have previously been deliberate on efforts towards 100 per cent transition across all levels of our school set-up.
This means that once a child begins school at kindergarten, they are expected to be graduating from college after 14 – 18 years from the time they made contact with a classroom.
The success of this will help elevate and infuse energy into our society through the implementation of leadership skills acquired across the journey.
Consequently, about 1 million students graduate every year from our universities and other learning institutions.
This means that as a country, we need at least 1 million opportunities in terms of jobs and entrepreneurial ventures to accommodate this output. Any lapses on either side of the divide create a dangerous disequilibrium across society.
Preparing students for the rigours of life that follow immediately after school requires consistent mentorship.
This will help them appreciate their skills and grow to contribute economically and socially to the growth of the country.
The government’s Elimu Scholarship and Equity Bank’s Wings To Fly beneficiaries have benefitted greatly from countrywide joint mentorship programs.
Such initiatives aimed at penetrating all corners of the country will play a key role in helping us lay a firm foundation for young adults in society.
The African continent is endowed with a vast amount of natural resources.
These are however under constant pressure from its growing population.
A huge chunk of the African Population is young under the age of 35; as we seek to revolutionize our education, the literacy levels among young Africans are rising faster than the global average.
This also means that the demand for jobs will consistently be higher than the global average.
The big question is, do we have the facilities and the capability to accommodate a sudden surge in literacy levels and job demand?
The World Bank estimates that Africa’s working-age population will grow to 450 million by 2035.
However, only 100 million jobs will be available to them.
This leaves a massive deficit and a huge burden on policymakers and stakeholders to ensure that our young men and women have an environment where they can thrive and create opportunities for themselves.
As modernism becomes entrenched in society, our socio-economic and cultural needs will become even more complicated.
How well we raise our children and the kind of mentorship we make available to them will define how comfortable society will turn out to be in the next few years.
The CBC Curriculum is a good fit for our needs.
We have a young and vibrant population that will no doubt reap its benefits and define our reality as a country in the coming years.
Mentoring them now will be key in helping them shape their realities.
These realities will subsequently be key to our overall development agenda.
The writer is a teacher at St Austins Academy, Lavington.