In whose hands are our schoolchildren secure?

Dear parent,

We pray that God has been kind to you, despite the constant boxing by poverty and school fees reminders.

Since we last spoke four weeks ago, your child has broken a measuring cylinder during a Chemistry lesson, punctured the only rugby ball in the entire zone, sold one of his blankets to buy bread and pocketed his hands while addressing a teacher. 

We should’ve sent him home on the first account, but we wanted you to use the back-and-forth commuter fees to clear your fee balance, because our schools would rather have children from families with third-class discipline than those who are first-class poor.

For four weeks now, our dormitories and classes have been protesting over congestion, but we didn’t think their oxygen levels were that low, because if they were they wouldn’t have been going up in flames.

The ministry has, consequently, decided to release your children for half-term break next week, to give us ample time to let the dormitory walls speak freely with investigators without the students interfering with witnesses.

We hope this break will help your child recover from cramming exam papers, join other concerned Kenyans in commiserating with Manchester United fans, and catch up with politicians on the baddest insults to help them pass their Social Studies Practicals.

Let your child accompany you to work for quality time together. Let them stay in traffic until they sweat their organs out, and when you’re pulled over, let them talk to the cops as they talk to teachers; and see if they won’t end up at a maxillofacial clinic with a painful jaw.

At the office, let them watch your boss breathe down your neck, and if by the third day they will not have burnt down the office, look for another way to test their pain threshold. If they complain of less sleep and breaking backs, remind them the employee of the month award has never been won by those who attempted to revise the dictionary to put pleasure before sweat.

Psychosocial damage

Please note that education experts visited the Prisons Department to find out why students remained unmoved by threats of being jailed for burning down schools.

The found out that unlike our schools, Kenyan prisons have well-equipped technical training workshops and prisoners learn for free. Their dormitories also don’t have triple-decker beds crammed like shipping containers, they have TV time and they also vote in the general elections. When asked what advice they had for secondary school students intending to burn down schools, a majority of the prisoners asked the students to choose wisely.

On pupils being allowed to march around with twigs, the teachers clarified that the 2010 Constitution doesn’t allow them to sit in the National Security Advisory Council to receive intelligence reports on arson planning, and if parents wanted them to be on top of things, they should change the Constitution as they’re “the people”.

On corporal punishment, teachers said it wasn’t an examinable subject in college, so they’re too incompetent to administer it. 

They added that if parents want schools to rein in arsonists in uniform, they should ask the President to let KDF run secondary schools too.

The teachers added that unlike rain, children don’t come from trees. Children come from homes – some breaking, some broken, some fixing, some fixed. The Ministry of Health has a list of mental health institutions and not one secondary school made the grade.

They said to repair the psychosocial damage parents do to their children at home, the Education CS should remove the cap on fees to enable schools build state-of-the-art psychosocial therapy labs manned by those who studied psychiatry, and not how to march in a parade.

The writer comments on topical issues; [email protected]