Will CBC be the gamechanger in Kenya's education journey?

The expatriate comes from a country that claims to value education. We may overlook the complexities and the vagaries of the America education ‘system’, but other Northern countries believe that they have the world’s best education system, underpinned by comprehensive research.

Of course, that these various European countries, for example, have wildly different systems is neither here nor there: they’re all supposedly ‘the best’, and all worth imposing abroad.

The French, Germans and British all still fund education projects from Kenya to goodness knows where else that broadly overlap with their own countries’ employment needs and their own countries’ modes of instruction. This of course sounds beautiful and lovely, for who could ever criticize when education is being provided?

That written, it should perhaps be remembered that one of the quiet impositions of colonialism was Western Education. We correctly reflect with horror upon how colonialism was physically violent, or how it stole land, or how it created ethnic antagonism, or how it imposed a foreign belief system, and so on. But, oddly, we sometimes overlook the oddness of the imposed education system, much of which we retain.

For example, those shorts that primary schoolboys have to wear until they mature into trousers at secondary school. What’s that about? It probably reflects the old British class system, or at least Britain’s habit of ranking people.

Indeed, uniforms in general.

We could then add the splitting up of knowledge into fixed categories called ‘disciplines’. Or the strict division of the learning day into fixed time periods.

Because always with us, these things seem to be invisible, or become ‘naturalised’ as ‘common sense’.

But common sense is never quite what it seems, and is usually just convention – something that we take for granted. People on the political right in Britain might say that it’s ‘common sense’ to be racist, but I hope and think we’d disagree.

Kenya is undergoing a structured overhaul of its educational system, and recently a milestone was reached: the last ever KCPE class graduated, and great congratulations to them. In a few years, the KCSE will fall, and then, next, university education in Kenya will shrink from four years to three years.

Milestones – but look, even that phrase, a ‘milestone’, is a British intrusion into language, with its foreign measurement and its allusion to the ancient tradition of the physical milestone. Perhaps our language – English, here – is so full of foreign cultural influence that we can’t resist it.  Maybe.

Will the new CBC be more ‘Kenyan’, more ‘ours’, more fitting? Some might say that Moi’s 8-4-4 was a decolonising moment; others, that the CBC makes education more relevant for the ‘modern Kenyan situation’.

But the 8-4-4 was fixated on terminal exams, in the style of the class-infused colonial-period British school system.

And the CBC’s ‘modern Kenyan situation’ probably really means ‘global capitalism’, which flows from the West/North. So, which is more decolonised? Let’s hope our graduates will still be able to reflect on such things.