The declaration by Education CS George Magoha that learners in basic education institutions will not progress to the next class in 2021 has been greeted with varied strong reactions by learners, parents, teachers and other education stakeholders.
As a school principal and father of two candidates (one in Standard 8 and another in Form 4), the announcement that there will be no national examinations this year was heart-wrenching. Before March, candidates in our schools were at different stages of shaping their dreams and aspirations as they prepared for the national examinations. Then Covid happened.
The Covid-19 pandemic has proved to be a raging bull in a China shop, wreaking havoc in literally all spheres of life the world over.
The fact that the bull is invisible has made it all the more difficult to decisively hunt it down and drive it out of the China shop and save the delicate crockery (including our children) from further destruction. Every day in the past few days, we have watched the numbers of victims of this invisible beast rise exponentially.
INSECURITY
As a parent and teacher, I agree with the Cabinet secretary that it would be reckless to recall learners at the peak of a pandemic. The fear, uncertainty, insecurity and other psycho-social anxieties that our learners are currently going through on account of the pandemic can only be aggravated if we recalled them to school before the tide abates.
Needless to say, the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the soft underbelly of our education system. In many countries, especially in Europe and America, the large majority of public schools are day schools.
In addition, those countries have put in place laws that prohibit parents from taking their children to public schools outside a certain radius from their residences. The net effect is that children spend less time travelling to school.
More importantly, since parents are tied to schools around their areas of residence they are forced by necessity to take an active role in the management, infrastructural development and student welfare programmes of those institutions.
Consequently, countries following this system have faced fewer challenges in reopening their institutions during the Covid-19 pandemic. To ensure physical and social distancing, the system allows learners to attend school in shifts or to practice blended learning in which learners are engaged in online learning activities and on-campus learning activities alternately per week.
PIPE DREAM
In a country like Kenya in which students traverse the breadth of the country to report to schools, this can only be a pipe dream.
The pandemic has also exposed certain attitudes towards education that we should begin to interrogate in earnest. What is the real meaning of education?
What is the parent’s role in the education of their children? I ask these two questions because many of us parents appear unable to differentiate between education and schooling. When we as parents view schools as the sole medium of ensuring our children’s growth and development, we miss the point. It would then explain why many parents feel so helpless in the face of this pandemic. They have had their children at home since March and are now faced with the daunting task of taking care of them until schools reopen, hopefully in January.
The question on every parent’s lip is, “What do I do with my children between now and January?” Indeed, education encompasses the development of the recipient in all aspects of their being. For education to be meaningful, the parent should be at the heart of the process. John Dewey, a celebrated educational philosopher, asserts that the business of the school is to deepen and extend the sense of the values bound up in the child’s home life.
EDUCATING CHILDREN
This presupposes that the parent has consciously made an effort to instill skills, values and attitudes, which form the foundation upon which teachers erect the intellectual capacities of the learners.
Parents should invest time and energy in educating their children on pertinent issues such as gender and sexuality, responsible digital citizenship, prudent use of the internet, drug and substance abuse and ensure their mental health.
While individual parents may find it difficult to facilitate all this, communal parenting would make it possible. As a teacher, I have no doubt in my mind that it will be possible to help our learners recover academically when schools reopen in January.
But success in this enterprise will depend on the state of the learners that we shall get back in schools when they reopen. This in turn will depend on what parents do with their children during this break. A lost academic year is not the worst thing that could happen to us; a generation lost to idleness and mischief with their concomitant effects such as drug and substance abuse will be the worst of it all.
The writer is the principal, Strathmore School
