What were the 'graduands' celebrating?

A Nairobi event this week reminded me of Celebration of Awareness, a small book by Ivan IIIich, the great American educator. He called it so because he based it on a speech he once made at a university graduation ceremony.

On Monday, I attended a similar ritual in which two of my nephews were among hundreds of University of Nairobi "graduands" (ugh!) who received degree certificates. As a rule, I don't go to birthday parties, baptisms, weddings, graduations and other events claimed to be life "milestones". I just dislike the pretence, the hypocrisy,the superstitious unction in which they suffocate.

But you can't insist too rigidly even on personal rules. After one of the nephews had pleaded and pleaded that I witness the event, my conscience convinced me to go. 

I nearly choked. It was as tedious as the astronomy lecture that once bored the poet into star-gazing. The only colourful thing was the gown. But the hood reminded you of a dunce's cap.

Containing little more than intellectual incest and narcissism, the speeches delivered by academic pontiffs would never, it seemed, come to an end. Was it possible to hope that the "academic community" was celebrating awareness? How much had their several years of tuition on the campus taught them about what the Germans call Zusammenhang between themselves, their society and the international situation?

Zusammenhang - as Humpty Dumpty says in Lewis Carroll's dictional creations in a mock-heroic poem called "Jabberwocky" - is a "portmanteau" term which represents the way natural and social things relate to one another. Awareness that all things hang together in a causal manner is the great objective of good education. 

The university is - better to say should be - the foundation stone, the infrastructure, as it were, of that awareness. IIIich's position is that what we should celebrate upon graduation is not yet knowledge but only a foundation for it. That is perhaps why America's system calls it "commencement". Americans, it seems, were originally aware that graduation is only the start of real education.

Green tree of real life

Formal classroom tuition is only the pedestal on which, if you have the beginnings of social consciousness, you know you must erect your intellectual house from the green tree of real life. That is what the piece of paper called "degree" should symbolise.

This awareness can only overwhelm you with the oppressive knowledge that you are deeply ignorant, the knowledge which made Socrates the wisest man in classical Athens. Everybody elsenwas ignorant but did not know it. Only Socrates was ignorant and knew it. And therein lay his wisdom and educability.

Graduation, therefore, should inspire the deepest sense of under-achievement and humility; a quest, an unrest, a curiosity, a craving, an unquenchable passion for learning; a yearning to master all the main intellectual currents of all nations and all epochs.

Can we say that our youngsters who graduated on Monday were celebrating this awareness? It is very difficult to affirm. For we know that practically all of them said good-bye to books for ever as soon as they grabbed that certificate.

The glaring question which our curricular institutions do not seem to ask is: Why? The answer seems truistic. The university has not taught them to love books for their own sake. You cannot love books when they are made to seem like adversaries from which you must wrench and then cram "daunting" facts and figures to pass examinations.

This was what Charles Dickens was laughing at when he made the master of his "School of Hard Facts" to define a horse as a "gramnivorous quadruped". How boring! How much more appetising is a disk jockey's definition: "My Jimmy is a sure-footed runner".

Our classrooms are not fountains of apperitifs of knowledge. They are only Siberias of mental hard labour, places to cram discrete academic facts and figures to be examined at the end of a set period so that you can be certified for slotting into "career", pigeonholes. ' Once you possess that certificate and can brandish it before an employer, your education is complete. For you have been taught throughout that career is the only purpose of education.

Very soon inside your career you will be on the road to social illiteracy. Ignorance will soon stand there like Okot p'Bitek's elephant. I ask our educational planners: Is that anything to celebrate?

This article — first published on December 2, 2001 — is part of the “Fifth Columnist Files” series that republishes Philip Ochieng’s long-running Sunday Nation column.