Kenyan Education System

For my class I had to post and give an overview of an article on another country's education system and I found this and thought I'd share the grim details with more people than my class mates. It kills me as I read and wrote this to think of all my students sitting inside our classrooms not taking advantage of the free gift of education they have! Anyway, here was my post in the class discussion board:

I knew right away what country I wanted to write about since I taught there for 2 years, but I found it difficult to find a useful web link on the subject of the Kenyan Education system. But I finally found this pdf file that has some good information about it. Here's the link and my summary is below:




Kenyan Education Ministry




This article points out that in 2003 the new government began to try to implement free primary education to all children. I know this was a big deal because I taught first year secondary students in 2001-2003 and many of them were almost my age (I was 21 when I stated there) because they had to sit out of school several years to save money to go back and then they would sit out a year and then go back... Anyway, about the article. Some of the highlights of problems they found in this study were the nomadic people in different regions who were unable to attend school regularly and therefore not able to continue an education. There is also not any set way to reach students with disabilities. "Over 90 percent of handicapped children are either at home or in regular schools with little or no specialized assistance" (page 6). In order to try to reach more students they are starting more boarding schools and feeding programs (p. 7). They do have a national curriculum and in 2003 they reduced the number of examinable subjects (p. 8). Now students only have to take 8 cumulative exams at the end of their secondary schooling. From my experience, I was given a book and told that the students who tested in Computer Science needed to know the content of that book by their fourth year. The material in the book was the curriculum. Talk about stress! This change in decreasing the number of tests was to relieve the teachers as well as students (p. 8). At the Secondary level, at the time of this document, 2.8 million children between the ages of 14 and 17 were not enrolled in schools! In 1999 a population census found that there are 4.2 million illiterate adults in Kenya (p. 10). 61% of those are women (p. 11). Since many do not continue in their education, there is a focus on teaching life skills and how to contribute to the "well being of society"(p. 11). As they seek to offer education to all, they see two different groups - those who will continue in education and those whose primary schooling (or any stage) is "terminal," meaning that is all they will get (p. 13). Kenya lacks well trained teachers. Not only are there not good ways to prepare as a teacher, many teachers ended up as teachers because it was their last resort (p. 20). Those training the future teachers are not even well trained themselves (p. 20)!



Wow, this article sure paints a dim picture for their national education system. What a mess! Maybe we should all go to Kenya and teach teachers how to teach effectively.