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Articles
By
Binyavanga Wainaina
Accredited -
Associated |
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Schooling For Small Minds: Curse Of
Being And African? |
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Posted By Binyavanga Wainaina September 1, 2008
When two or
three Kenyans of the professional classes get
together, we often talk about how professional
we are. We are very professional, we nod. Our
professionals built modern Botswana, we nod.
Did you know we send more students to America
than any other African country?
Our professionals
groan when posted to Uganda, or Tanzania, or
South Africa even -- these people don't work;
they take long lunches; they don't save. They
eat spicy foods that are bad for the stomach.
The colours they wear in Ghana are too
dizzying: they do not mark seriousness, all
those tailors and waxed fabrics. Did you know
many rich Nigerians send their kids to our
academies?
Of course the horrible big-picture truth of it
all is that we are statistically just as poor
and vulnerable as all those poor, colourful
people who eat spicy foods and won't fit in
with Deloitte & Touche's corporate culture.
Now, if there is a country that bewilders us,
it is that perpetually overheating place
called Nigeria, where quantum physicists give
up Harvard jobs to start giant churches that
attract three million Sunday worshippers, then
decide to open up Maximum Mega Worship Centre
in Waco, Texas -- because rednecks need God
too.
To be a Kenyan is to be cursed by a system
that pretends to function. There is enough of
a school system, a health system, a private
sector, good banks and tall buildings for
everybody to see them. What nobody tells you
is that this splendour is available only to
the 5% who make it through the filters.
So bodies are beaten into the right shape for
the bottleneck called progress: the last cow
is sold for the diploma certificate; people
sleep outside the offices of bureaucrats to
register; "cram" academies wake up 11-year-old
kids at 4am; mothers buy brain porridge mixes
from millers to feed to their aspirational
kids (some of these mixes have powdered fish,
millet, maize, powdered milk and aloe vera).
School holidays are spent in camps paying
teachers vast sums to drum quadratic equations
into the fishy-fertilised brains of the young.
English composition templates are memorised:
make sure you have three wise sayings, four
similes, no daffodils please; memorise things
like "as black as my grandmother's cooking
pot".
Every year, as the national primary school
exams are announced, some young child who got
488 out of 500 marks is paraded in front of us
all and says: "I studied 17 hours a day with
the help of my parents. I learned 1 400
similes and 48 000 composition templates. My
teacher coached us through the exam paper the
night before the exam."
Art and music are no longer in our school
curriculum.
For schooling is Kenya's largest and most
effortful industry, even larger than the
churches. All this effort is for a few places
in four or five very good schools, or four or
five very good jobs.
These brain-dead
robots we produce are so beaten into
submission they run around the city wielding
brown envelopes with CVs and letters of
introduction and spend excruciating hours in
cyber cafés looking for scholarships. Every
bit of creative thinking, of bold idea-ing, of
do-it-yourselfing is removed.
We have designed a being that makes a good
filing clerk; a great book-keeper. We export
well-behaved sous-chefs to Dubai. We took the
colonial system, which was designed to produce
dutiful people who don't ask questions, and
perfected it.
What we have now is a system that serves to
produce people who simply want the paper
certificate to be members. Ideas have no
value. Mimicry is God. Vision -- that
intangible by-product of the wide-reading
musical child who always challenged his
teachers and who will start some truly
innovative company -- has been leached away.
In the past few years we have found our
high-school education system collapse under
the weight of many years of accumulated
bullshit. Exams can be bought on the street;
but you may still fail, for it is becoming
clear to everybody that many exams are not
marked. Results are often different from the
papers you sat.
Some say they replace final exams with mock
results because teachers are unable to mark;
or there is confusion when an entire class
writes exactly the same English composition.
Nobody resigns.
So when more than 300 schools went on the
rampage recently, around mock exam time, our
Cabinet met and decided that the problem was
"too much democracy" -- and the cane was
reintroduced.
As usual every Kenyan problem comes down the
same thing: perform violence on the body of
your citizens so they can pay a personal price
for the incompetence of their ministry of
education or the incompetence of their
xenophobic politicos.
There is one skill we have: we understand how
to put our heads down and make small profits
from being cynical sycophants and brokers in
small deals for big men. We have learned that
ideas are dangerous. To innovate is to
threaten power.
Our country is an imperium: as we were in
colonial days, African bodies at the service
of an imperial political class that designs
all policy to perpetuate itself. |
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