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| Quality Education in Africa and the World is Gradually Becoming a Preserve of the Rich |
 PRINTABLE VERSION |
Kenya has been commended for being one of the few developing nations to offer free primary education to its citizens. Considering the high levels of illiteracy, poverty and the low standards of living in the country, this is certainly a step in the right direction toward the achievement of its development goals. However, the apparent rise in the cost of high school and post-secondary education needs urgent redress if all deserving Kenyans are to get access to quality education and help develop their nation.
Currently, many qualified students are being left out of the public university admission system due to the quotas and restrictions on cut-off points. The number of privately sponsored students is on the increase in these institutions of higher learning with a corresponding decrease in the (usually poor) government sponsored ones. Many are those who drop out of high school and other institutions of higher learning due to a lack of ability to pay the fees; many others have had to contend with erratic school and college attendance caused by the lack of adequate funds as caused by poverty.
While in high school it is relatively easy to live and study once one has paid full school fees; the same is not true in institutions of higher learning where payment of full college fees is not a guarantee to accommodation and meals for which one has to find an alternative means of paying. With the introduction of cost sharing, poor students have thus been relegated to the dungeons of hunger and in many cases poor accommodation facilities outside the main college hostels.
Many students of tertiary and higher learning institutions have thus resorted to illicit means of survival through cohabitations, drug peddling, prostitution, and the search for ‘sugar mummies and sugar daddies;’ these are witnessed by their off campus dealings and some of their newspaper adverts of the same. Others have delved into crime headlong with disastrous consequences. The ingenious ones have opted for small businesses as well as hawking to make ends meet.
For the poor students in today’s institutions of higher learning, life has become an untold misery. Many are those who’ve opted to drop out of school to go look for jobs so as to be able to sustain themselves and their siblings while in college. Some others, more or less women, drop out to get married so as to be able to lead good lives through the support of their husbands. A brief look through some of the courses considered “marketable” reveals a great ‘poverty chasm’ in the faculties, with the majority in those courses being those who can afford to fund their education privately.
With many of the poor students thinking of where their next meal will come from when they are supposed to be concentrating in class, their future is bleak. To them, completing their studies in itself is not a guarantee of employment. What with the ‘do-you-know-anybody’ syndrome still pervading the recruitment panels of most organizations in a country still recuperating from years of selfish politics, influence peddling, nepotism, favouritism, tribalism, ‘palm greasing,’ cronyism and sexism, negatives formed and still form the norm of most daily dealings, even post the so-called ‘Second Liberation.’
In his book ‘None Dare Call It Treason,’ Republican aficionado John Stormer assaults the motive of some of the pioneers of the western system of education such as John Dewey. Stormer argues that the intention of Dewey and his ilk was to reprogram the minds of the population and destroy moral and intellectual absolutes, thereby adulterating imagination. Stormer, rightfully so, calls them traitors to the concept of intellectual and moral absolutism, equating them to Sigmund Freud, the infamous propagator of the selfishly-mired “do it if it feels good, don’t care if it hurts others” concept.
Phillip Ochieng, a prolific African-Kenyan writer, once referred to the western education system as that which “tethers the minds” of the students to foreign concepts of psychosocial and mental development. This seems to be the current situation in Kenya and other parts of Africa where many graduates, especially those of the poverty stricken extraction, can hardly get any meaningful places to exploit their talents and earn a decent living.
Loaded with theoretical intellect that can hardly fit into the socio-economic polygon of the country, it is therefore not surprising today to encounter jobless engineers, lawyers, and even scientists. Products of job seeking-oriented economies and not job creation-driven economies.
The situation is much worse for bright but poor high school drop-outs who fail to further their education either due to lack of funds or as a result of being left out by the rigors of the university and college placement exercise. While their well-off counterparts can afford to go to private universities or even pay for their own studies in public universities, these poor but bright students are often forced to look for sources of income and most of the time fend for themselves and their families too.
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Antony Felix O. Simbowo
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