Don’t think of abolishing boarding schools

In boarding school, children can focus better on their studies because television, video games, phones and other distractors are limited. At home, these barriers are all over and, therefore, limit their concentration.

These young scholars usually perform better academically because they live in an environment that is conducive for learning. The advantages of having children in boarding school are many — including unique learning opportunities, good career prospects, a ‘community’ feeling and foster discipline.

Taking children to day schools so that the government can get to admit learners across the country to pursue various pathways in senior secondary school as envisioned under the new 2-6-3-3-3 education system, better known as the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC), will disadvantage the country because there will be a huge drop in academic performance.

First of all, the day schools that are near home will be congested and won’t be conducive for quality learning. The biggest boarding school experience is the fact that learning never stops — compared to day schools, where students usually laze around after school and sleep early without doing their homework.

Learning environment

The students are immersed in a learning environment 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And even when outside the classroom, they’re still learning vital life skills that they wouldn’t learn while sitting at home after school and during the weekend.

Most boarding schools are very strict about homework; so, you can be sure that your child is getting it done in a distraction-free environment. Since it’s often in designated time slots, the child has no choice but to do it. Butit’s completely different in day school: Students often occupy themselves with irrelevant stuff.

The same case was experienced last year, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Most of the children didn’t complete their homework despite the long time span that they had. Some utilised their time badly, as evidenced by the many cases of teenage pregnancy recorded over the pandemic-induced long holiday.

I disagree with the idea of converting boarding schools into day schools as that will bring more harm than good to students and the nation as a whole.

Beryl Otieno, via email

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Of late, dormitories in several schools have been reduced to ashes and property worth millions of shillings destroyed in unexplained fires.

To stop such destructive incidents, their causes must be promptly established. If the students are tired of being in boarding school, let’s go back to years ago when all schools were day or a blend of day and boarding.

Elizabeth Mwikali Gathungu, Kiambu