Equipped for Success, Educate our Children

FACT:- Being in school Is NOT the same as learning.

As of 2019, Kenya counted 32,344 primary educational institutions, including private and public schools with a population of slightly above 10 million pupils. 10,463 secondary educational institutions, including private and public schools. There are 30 public universities, 30 chartered private universities, and 30 universities with Letter of Interim Authority (LIA). Registered training colleges over 45.4 thousand.

For the last two decades, the government has embarked on putting pupils in schools and ignored the learning process, the art of gaining knowledge.

I believe that we can get more freedom and independence with increased knowledge.

Regimes have in the past successfully used education systems to control what people think and limit their knowledge with the belief that the less they know the easier it becomes to govern them. We send half of our population to school but fail to question what they are taught.

A direct quote from (Wamagatta, 2008, p. 8);

After the First World War, Africans became increasingly aware of the importance of education, were demanding it and school enrolment increased. The government became involved in the control of mission schools and determined that Africans would get technical education while Europeans and Asians would get academic education. Africans resented technical education which they deemed inferior and suitable only for menial jobs. The African was not interested in an education “that would make him remain a peasant in a modern economy and dominated by alien immigrants to Kenya. [He] wanted education that would give him power and prestige and dignity and self-sufficiency”

My school of thought thinks that allowing the government to dictate what can and cannot be taught in schools is as much an affront to free speech as the government controlling the press or the internet. Just as the news media and the internet should be free from government control and manipulation, so too should education be free from the government.

Not long ago during the Moi era, we used to have free thinkers, students who were able to ask the government of the day hard questions, students who could tell that the government was abusing their economic and social freedom and acted to free self.

Today we have been brainwashed clean. We have come to accept less freedom and embrace social harassment silently. And I blame the change in behavior on our education system.

We are being taught to ask fewer questions even when things are not right. We are being taught to be less patriotic and that is why we can accept evils against Kenya like corruption and plastic pollution to mention but a few.

My focus in office will be in helping teachers at all levels become more effective in facilitating learning, improving technology for learning, strengthening management of schools and systems while ensuring learners of all ages from preschool to adulthood are equipped for success. I will focus on gaining knowledge. I will encourage knowledge transfer.

We must break from the cycle we have been forced to be in, we must refuse to be made poor and less informed to be tamed and governable. The idea of a system that governs the masses must be halted. We must allow every person to be a genius in their unique ways.

It is time we focused on producing and graduating more engineers, more medics, more researchers and scientists, more economists and actuaries, it’s time we had our philosophers and writers. It’s time we started to produce and use our pharmaceutical drugs. It’s time we changed what we feed our students in school. It’s time we encouraged the next crop of free thinkers. It’s time our children dreamt of being rocket and robotics scientists.

In the words of Nicky Verd:- “You are yet to catch up with the real world if you’ve never studied any concepts outside the school syllabus or read any books beside the texts books school forced you to read. Most people are just programmed not educated”

China’s education system is not only immense but diverse. It has the largest education system in the world. With almost 260 million students and over 15 million teachers in about 514 000 schools. The students are being taught and prepared to be the next superpower. Their vision is crystal clear. What is our agenda as Kenyans? What do we want to achieve as a nation when we educate our children?

Do have a blessed and thoughtful day.

Regards

PC Gutuiyu

For a better Kajiado North

MP 2022–2027

Mungu Mbele