Use the CBC to deschool society, it's no longer fun for kids

A schooling system where the mark of honour for male college students is the number of girls from a ‘rival tribe’ they have raped in a year, where kids learn to experiment with drugs, engage in sex and burn schools, is anarchy. 

It is a global problem. According to a 2014 Fox News report, about 20 percent of American female students had been sexually assaulted. The number could be higher today.

Schooling as we have it today should be radically reformed. Its structure, form, and content delivery are proving more and more socially detrimental. It is no longer viable.

Social critic Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society is spot on. The Austrian scholar points out that modern schooling is no different from prisons where kids barely out of diapers are given weapons.

And like some prisoners in Kamiti jail, many pupils no longer leave schools to be balanced, responsible adults and citizens: rather they turn out to be hardened social misfits. The only difference between prisons and schools is that pupils go home for holidays.

Over-schooled society

We may dither about school reforms, blame teachers, parents, the internet, anything, but the riots we see in schools are symptoms of an over-schooled society.

We put little children inside branded institutions, complete with walls and guards, and subject them to a rigid preprogrammed routine called a curriculum. The content is forced down their throats by tired, underpaid and despised teachers. The content itself is decided by adults who may or may not be clueless about the contextual nuances. 

All this is against the background of a largely broken society where parenting is rapidly weakening. And we expect holistically formed adults at the end? The biggest problem is that the school is no longer fun for kids.

Before industrialisation, children were infused with learning through apprenticeship. 
A child was a small adult, wore the same clothes as adults, was hanged the same way as adults and went to the same hell with adults. Child rights are a creation of the working class.

In the 1970s we wanted to be in school. Home meant unpaid labour in coffee, tea, sugar or in anything that boasted household incomes. While we learnt crucial life lessons at home, school was where fun was. 

The situation is reversed today: home has the Internet of Things, a mesmerising vista of sensations all packaged as little sweet cakes that dissolve immediately they are placed on the tongue. It is endless entertainment. Observe the ecstasy that holds kids during holidays immediately they hold your smartphone. Society has become more affluent.

School is boring for modern kids. This difference between school and home plays havoc on young minds. It is more confusing for kids from broken families.

Why then should we be surprised when children torch schools for sport?

We confuse schooling and learning. Schooling is about institutions where packaged learning is doled out in bits often in a hostile environment. Learning is the function of education, through which we acquire skills. It does not have to be in a classroom. It is lifelong.

The modern school has been more harmful in Africa: the curriculum is still rooted in archaic foreign concepts. We have never been able to indigenise school education and therefore we do not own it.

It is worse in Kenya. Here the emphasis is on certificates, titles to be acquired in the shortest time possible. 

Now, the psychological impact of schooling is already apparent.

There are many ‘successful’ men and women in academia, business, politics, and religion: physical grownups in their 30s and 40s who are nonetheless emotional adolescents trapped in adult bodies. No society is equipped to undo this.

This is why the current school reforms are important. 

When children burn schools, we must critically ask: what are they communicating? School is a social creation, not the other way round. Perhaps children are rebelling against society? Against a curriculum that is at best archaic, and its numbing
 delivery methods? Against boring, non-empathic teachers and parents?

Some big corporate entities have already realised the detrimental effects of formal schooling. They noted long ago that new employees could not simply perform despite advanced degrees.

Companies like Google and Netflix no longer recruit directly from college. They prefer on-the-job training.

I do not know what those who mooted the Competence-Based Curriculum had in mind, but the implications of child-parent participation in the learning process will be positively enormous. That is, if it is not bungled, Kenyan style.

In its fullest sense, CBC should cut down the school in the learning process by stressing what the child can do, when, and how, away from the classroom. 

By involving the parent more in the learning, we will be mitigating the harmful effects of the ‘school prison’.

Deschooling is not an alien idea. A growing number of parents in Kenya are already practising ‘home learning’ for various reasons. Listening to those who have gone through ‘deschooling’ and those who interact with them, one gets the impression of well-rounded individuals unfussed by the chaos around them.

By transferring to the parent some of the roles the overburdened teachers play, CBC is some form of deschooling the society.

With CBC, we are returning learning where it should start naturally: home.  

CBC is a window to redeem the learning process and return it to what it is supposed to be: a positively transformative process.

Dr Mbataru teaches public policy Kenyatta University; [email protected]