Should Kenya rush children through school?
Although I was at the top of the class, I was made to repeat a Standard IV (Fourth Grade) because my handwriting looked like “chicken footprints on mud.” The real reason was that they wanted to “promote” older students, some of whom had repeated for as many as three times. There was also concern that if I entered high school too soon I’d be too young to defend myself against violent freshman hazing, which was rampant in Kenyan secondary schools.
(Four chapters of my memoir are about my high school ordeal. The book will be available in stores as soon as I find a publisher interested in an African story about a lost boy, me, but one which lacks AIDS, civil wars, an infantry full of infants, Apartheid, severe malnutrition, blood diamonds and Wangari Maathai).
Anyway, you can blame my apparent anger and mental illness on my Old Man and those brutes at Makairo Primary School for making me redo Standard IV. They sparked the beginning of my painful pursuit of education. Why should I work so hard, only to be made to repeat, a 10-year-old me wondered. I never placed at the top of any class again.
My father and teachers responded violently in attempts to slow down my academic decay. When I finally made it to a boarding high school, I fell at the mercy of students who had been held back in primary schools so long that they were now men. They turned high school into something you’d get of you married a county jail to a military camp. They beat us. We did their laundry and fetched them water from a creek a mile downhill. We made their beds. We polished their shoes. They took our money.
Yet I’m conflicted whether students should be held back until they have passed to move on to the next level. The part of me that has a baby brother who was bullied so much last year that we had to transfer him to another school feels that all students should enter high school at the same age, so that some don’t have physical advantage over others.
But the part of me that has lived in America so long and has seen college graduates who don’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re” or “than” and “then” thinks we shouldn’t let children zoom through school just because they have to be out of high school at 18.
I hope Kenya doesn’t go from one extreme to another. Maybe, rather than impose a total ban in repetition, what we need is a limit in the number of times a child can repeat a class.
No related posts.