NAIROBI, Kenya, Apr 27- “Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention,” Neil Postman, an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic once said.
Sometimes in 2016, the former Principal of Alliance High School, Mr. David Kariuki, lamented that students in High School today would rather be at home than at school.
That was the recurring answer he got from students whenever he asked them about where—between school and home—they should be whenever he had posed the question to them in a school assembly.
Kariuki raised the issue when the then Cabinet Secretary for Education, Dr. Fred Matiang’i had met Principals of National School regarding proper administration of national examination free from corrupt behaviour.
Most of the Principals agreed with Kariuki’s observation. The anecdotal explanation for students’ attitude was that most children these days hail from middle class backgrounds.
The argument was that, unlike their counterparts more than 30 years ago, the current generation of students have better diets and better accommodation back home compared to what the school affords them. Hence their wish to be at home at all times.
Students’ preference for their homes to school is not unusual. A home, for adults and children alike, needs no justification. We all feel the transcendent value of a home when we are at home and away. It is a place of warmth, comfort, and affection.
It doesn’t matter whether there is enough or balanced food or ample sleeping space to like at home. Warmth, comfort, and affection is what all human beings, children most of all, hunger for before they begin to appreciate tertiary needs and utilities.
There is no other institution, however well-endowed in human wants and needs, which can replace a home. Nor does the need for those things other institutions provide suspend the enduring need for warmth, comfort, and affection in the learners and adults.
Policymakers in education the world over acknowledge this fact. Education policy, curricula, standards and the administration of examinations, for instance, provide for the safety, comfort and welfare of learners.
It is the reason why the Ministry of Education stipulates certain things the school administrators to do or comply with to ensure that teaching and learning take place in a school climate that meets certain specifications.
In general, a school climate refers to the quality and character of school life. It is its heart and soul. In essence, this is what determines whether a child and a teacher, will love the school and to look forward to being there each school day.
It is important to have competent teachers, curriculum materials, classrooms, and hostels—if the school is a boarding school.
However, it is important, perhaps more important that learners feel comfortable, safe and appreciated—all their idiosyncrasies. There can be no optimal learning without these. They are basic to any meaningful learning experience. The irreducible minimum for learning.
Making the school a happy place is a worthwhile pursuit as implementing a national curriculum.
The Basic Education Regulations 2015 makes certain stipulations—profound by any standards—that provide for a school climate that has the capacity to make learning warm, comfortable and stress-free.
The Regulations, issued and signed by Former Cabinet Secretary, Prof. Jacob T. Kaimenyi in 2015, stipulate that learners attend official teaching between the hours of 8 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. with an extra hour and 15 minutes afterward for games and club.
The regulations have demonstrated faith in learners to conduct self-directed learning by providing for preps between 7.30 p.m. to 9.30 p.m., Monday to Friday for learners in boarding schools. Implied in this regulation is that learners should be in their dormitories by 10.00 pm—for bedtime which should last from 9.30 pm to 6.00 am.
And 6.00 a.m. to 8.00 a.m. has been provided for supervised routine activities.
The weekend is for general cleaning of the hostels, classrooms and the compound with Preps slated for 10.00 am to 12noon for boarders.
Adherence to this means students will have ample time—outside the official 8.00 a.m. to 3.30 p.m. for class hours from Monday to Friday, to have their personal private time and private space to prepare, to go through what teachers have taught, in effect consolidating their personal understanding of the basic ideas and concepts in the curriculum.
There is a need to trust children from a very early age with independent study, perhaps arranged in school, but which takes away from the institutional setting.
Learner-centered education or instruction is that which enables teachers to thoroughly prepare their lessons and offer quality instruction experience to learners.
Students learn in such a school climate. They are attentive and focused. They take advantage of every class period to learn with meaning. Things don’t pass their ears, as my late grandmother would say.
We need to recognise a school climate where each learner—particularly those in grade four all the way form Four— have a chance to develop private uniqueness and self-reliance.
That is what Competence Based Curriculum (CBC) stands for. That is what every education system worth its salt is all about.
CBC is actually rooting for quality educational experience—and that experience is directed by the learner under the intelligent supervision of the teacher.
Such an educational experience will provide children, and learners with private time or private space to learn. To explore.
Such an educational experience will provide the necessary balance between teaching, learning and testing. Such an educational experience will, when holidays come, ensure schools release learners to go home without prevarication. They will not burden students with either holiday tuition or unnecessary school work where the students are asked to make copious notes for syllabus content they have not been taught.
Such an educational experience will nurture a school climate that is, in the words of former President George Herbert Bush, a “kindler, gentler” school system across the length and breadth of the country.
Then learners will have a minimum of seven hours sleep in their school. They will have time for games, for washing clothes.
They will have time to think not just about what they are learning and its applications in life; they will also think about who they are and how they can make themselves better men and women going forward.
They will also have time to read class readers and also—for form threes and fours—set books. They will read widely—meeting the very essence of quality education anywhere.
They will also have time to talk to their peers about their families, their dreams, and their frustrations—away from the obsessive preoccupation with syllabus coverage that blights their other equally important developmental aspects of their lives.
This will cut down the boredom that endless teaching engenders. These moments are therapeutic. They help release stress. They won’t burn anything combustible when provoked.
Take these and other associated things into account, and the students will not say that they would prefer to be home when they should be in school.
Instead, they will say they prefer being in school at that particular point because learning has meaning beyond grades, beyond examinations, and beyond a career. That they are finding school life fulfilling in its own right.
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