Of course he does not let us know that
he has bought exams for the school and
together with his teachers he has coached
the students to memorize the exams and
the result is national adulation and an ego
uplift that all humans crave.
If, perchance, the headmaster is not
cooperative enough then entrepreneurial
teachers step in and join the gravy train
and reap the benefit of ensuring that they
have no stupid students. Being stupid
actually means you cannot afford to buy
the exams and you are recommended to
repeat.
For this system to work the parents have
to be actively involved as they are the ones
that provide the cash. No parent wants to
believe that his or her child is not school
material and they will blame anything
except their children for failure.
Parents endeavor to take their children to
the ‘best’ school with the sole purpose of
getting superior results and it is music to
their ears when it is whispered that success
is guaranteed for those that are willing to
fund not ‘tuition’ but some extra classes.
Parents, in the interest of having bragging
rights on how smart their children are, of
course inherited from them and avoiding
hanging their heads in shame for a child’s
D in a class where all the children got an
A are more than willing to play ball.
So we have been producing educational
robots whose sole purpose is to pass an
exam and Kenya has woken up to this
calamity and realized we are supporting
a national disaster as we remind ourselves
that the purpose of schooling is to prepare
a child to live and fit in society.
The caliber of the students that we are
producing is worrying in that we have
a lot of wheelbarrows that can only
function when pushed because that is
what they learnt in school and at home.
Surprisingly we expect them to be able
to think independently when they have
never thought.
When you factor in the cost to society
that this cheating system creates then
you begin to really worry. You have
architects that cannot design, engineers
that cannot repair a cart, doctors that do
not understand medicine, politicians who
cannot debate and teachers that cannot
teach.
The saddest part is that you have
graduates who are living in self-delusion
thinking that they know it all because
they have papers that say so and are even
accumulating more papers believing that
the papers, not them, will be working.
The employer is frustrated; he has highly
qualified idiots that are not productive but
demand top dollar for their ‘qualifications’.
The employer finds that he has to spend
another two years training these highly
qualified imposters to extract any value
from them.
Kenya has woken up to the disaster we
have created and that is why it is now
easier to pass through a stringent airport
security check than to simply go and sit
a Kenyan exam. Amazingly this has not
deterred the exam cheating cartels and
they are still finding loopholes.
The most effective way to destroy a
country is to tamper with the education
system and that is why we have been
having endless debates on the viability of
the 8-4-4 system. Now we have to also
contend with cheating in the same debate.
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