For weeks now, I have lost the count of the schools that have been burned down – mostly dormitories, but also classrooms and laboratories. Trading of blaming blows has been common in the media, some blaming the government for banning of corporal punishment to our children, some blaming Dr Fred Matiang’i for the extension of school term, some blaming school principals for lack of discipline and surveillance, some blaming parents for lack of time for their children, and so on. I feel however, that we will not end this catastrophe until we admit that each of us can do something.
First, I feel that we have all failed in getting our students to understand the country we are living in – Kenya. Even when I will never support the concept of boarding schools, more than 30 per cent of our secondary school students are learning in schools without dormitories and wish they could have some. Indeed, the main reason why even in 2017, around 200,000 of the 2016 candidates will not proceed to secondary school is because we do not have classrooms and dormitories to accommodate them. If every student in secondary school in Kenya today understood that we are yet to build so much to have all Kenyan students proceed to secondary school, they would not burn anything. Rather, they would themselves start up a nation-wide fundraising campaign to raise money to build more secondary schools, more laboratories, more classrooms.
Secondly, all parents have failed. Generally speaking, all Kenyan parents need help. Yet, we have no school for parents. In one school, students burnt their school because the discipline master had confiscated a mobile phone from one boy. Even when I do not understand why we still ban mobile phones from schools when we are spending billions to ‘promote a digital culture among students’, who was the parent of this boy? To what extent do parents inculcate values in their children at home, and the value of the rule of law? How many parents can stand to be counted, for modelling strong character in their children?
Third, schools have remained to be “juvenile corrective institutions”, while Kenya moved on long time ago from dictatorship to adopt democracy. Even when I support every effort to curb cheating in examinations, I know that opening the school to parents and having parents as centre pin of education is more critical than any A that a student will get. I feel we need to question the boarding school that fundamentally weakens the role of parents, and question every school that limits the interaction between parents and their children. Can the autocratic school systtem, where decisions are made for adolescents without questioning or contribution, still stand? Are things falling apart in our school management model? What I can bet, is that in every burnt school, there are a thousand management lessons to learn from. How are we transforming school management to mirror the changes in our society? If decisions by President Uhuru Kenyatta can be stopped by a citizen, why shouldn’t students have the chance to at least question the decisions made by the school management and have chance to provide alternatives?
To prevent the 100th school from burning, we must all admit that we are guilty and move on to do something. If you are a parent to a girl or boy in secondary school, make effort to get in touch with the school to establish whether there are tensions. If there are, at least talk to your son or daughter to make them understand that they need to build more, rather than burn. If your school has already burnt, then sit down with your son or daughter and let them start fundraising for rebuilding of the school, because it will be certainly you and not Matiang’i, to pay for it. If you are a teacher, or school principal, this is the time to open space for interaction and discussion. You cannot just sit there and assume that your school is not about to burn. Engage students, even to discuss with them their take on the schools that have burnt. For those that haven’t, begin those Friday afternoon school parliament meetings for students to air grievances, so that you create space for dialogue. If you sense a lot of tension, there’s nothing that prevents you from considering a second mid-term as a pre-emptive measure, or calling parents for an impromptu visit to help you address the issues. I am confident that if all of us did something, we will prevent the burning of any extra school and contribute to the building of more schools instead.
Dr John Mugo is the Director of Data and Voice at Twaweza East Africa. For feedback, send
an email to jmugo@twaweza.org