When I was in primary school, there was a list I dreaded being on, and no, this wasn’t the noisemaking list but rather the list of students who hadn’t completed paying their fees.
The headteacher would come into each class right after the morning assembly, reading out names of those who hadn’t paid their fees so loudly it felt as though one was a criminal of some sort.
You were then commanded to immediately pack your belongings and head on back home, never to come back until your arrears were cleared.
As a child, being singled out in this manner unconsciously scars you as you suffer from gruesome feelings of shame and not belonging.
Those who grew up with parents who did everything they could to put them through school know this feeling too well even as adults.
From an early age, you start to feel and notice that you are being treated like someone from another group who is essentially different from and generally inferior to the rest. An act which is known as othering.
Othering is precisely what the entire education system of Kenya is currently doing by refusing to acknowledge that most learners aren’t learning.
By insisting that examinations will proceed as planned because supposed electronic learning is happening is what othering is.
In this case, it is applauding the few who are benefiting from online learning while shunning those who aren’t without an ounce of concern for their circumstances.
A majority of Kenyan learners don’t have the infrastructure to link them to the internet and if they do, they don’t have the necessary tools – such as laptops – to enable them to participate in online learning.
The illusion that learning from home is taking place is a conscious bias that is remiss of the context.
The burden of electronic learning cannot, therefore, be the burden of vulnerable households who should be supported by the government.
To make it worse, Kenya has an exam-based education system that is dependant on completion of syllabus, which can’t successfully happen when schools are closed and the majority of learners are locked out of online learning.
It is time the Education ministry accepted that the way it is treating learners who are disadvantaged is very harmful because it is teaching them to see themselves as less valued and, of course, othered.
The ministry needs to make decisions that are inclusively aware of the realities of the many Kenyan children who deserve an education just like their fellows.
The continued institutionalisation of group differences, which manifest in policies that discriminate, should stop because children of vulnerable families mustn’t be made to feel unworthy.
