CBC curriculum turmoil has Kenyan schools billing up inequality

To watch your child grow is a magical thing that unfolds right in front of you. It’s unfathomable how three years have flown by fast, how time can move without you realizing it. My little munchkin who could not utter a word just yesterday is now all blubber and ready for school and I couldn’t be more in awe. What a blessing.

You think about when your baby will join school soon after they are born. I remember looking out for schools near home whenever I would be going for a walk or driving past our home area.

The usual domestics, my lover and I had our little debate of what schooling for our children would mean. I was obviously of the idea that he should get everything better than I did, it is the least a parent should do. But he was of the opinion kids will turn out how they will turn out.

Read also: Let our kids learn in mother tongue first

The only thing we were sure about when it came to his education was that we wanted him to go somewhere close to home. Where the transport would not be a hustle. We did not want our three-year-old sleep-deprived as we had seen children in the neighborhood, waking up extremely early to catch a school bus.

It is ironic however that my son is a morning person. He is always up by six am anyway.

Fog of Chaos

Outside of that, it was a fog, we could not know for sure what he would learn at school, how much it would cost, or even how long it would take.

The education sector in Kenya provides education services for over 16 million children and youth, with almost 500,000 teachers distributed in close to 90,000 preprimary, primary, and secondary education institutions.

Education is big business, the government alone spent a total of Kes666 billion on education in the Financial Year 2023/2024.

The private sector on the other hand had seen the number of preprimary schools increase by 11 percent and the number of secondary schools by 17 percent between 2017 and 2019, while the number of primary schools only increased marginally. The number of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) and tertiary education institutions doubled, as did enrollment numbers in tertiary.

My only estimation of how money is involved in education came from my interaction with insurers, who paint a picture of great calamity from their risk assessments. You had better start saving or your child will surely end up among the pool of masses locked out of the system by education.

Narrow elite

Years of Kenyan education had served to create a narrow elite for the country, those who could, enjoy the limited benefits of rentier capitalism while the rest of the unqualified stayed behind and labored. A grading system eliminates the bottom of the pyramid and locks them out of economic mobility from primary all the way to university.

The rise in the ideas of meritocracy and shift to industrial economies reliant on educated workers, has led to calls to reform the system and give everyone basic access.

Even at its most egalitarian state which I went through when President Mwai Kibaki introduced, the free system of education just over a decade ago, enrollment in primary hit almost universal levels, but falls sharply when transitioning to secondary education.

But now it seems things may be reversing again, education is slipping out of reach if you could not afford it.

Yet education remains one of the most important determinant of the wellbeing of the average Kenyan, something that is even admitted by the World Bank in the Kenya Economic Report of 2022.

As we moved from school to school, leaving with leaflets that would show what the school offered and how much it would cost to have our son admitted to the school, we quickly realized that elementary education was very costly.

Business of education

The first thing I noticed is that we would pay almost the same amount for school uniforms as we would for tuition fees. Back in my day (age is catching up), we would go with our home clothes and just have an apron to put on top of them, with our names sewed in.  We started to wear uniforms in class 1 now grade 1.

Now things were different. All these schools had at least a normal school uniform and P.E kit/ tracksuit.  Children from playgroup were expected to be in full uniform which they sold within the school compound.

These uniforms may need some replacement almost every other year depending on how your child grows and plays. Add that to stationery, books, shoes and bags, and you are spending almost the same if not more than you are for tuition.

And it doesn’t end there, the textbooks you’ll need to buy each year. Then they change the systems and editions so often that hand-me-downs become irrelevant after a while.

I had not realized how big of an economy education was until now. I even learned that playgroup was not compulsory but the schools would take your children anyway if you could spare the coin.

Not one school we visited told us about this, that we could wait to have our son join PP1, but they sold us their school and some even said they take kids as young as 2 years.

In fact, they all had these pictures on their walls for graduating toddlers and it becomes too apparent that these are billing companies that have you on the register for anything they can sell you for the years your child is in their ecosystem.

But after spending that much on schooling and taxes, you would hope that the education the government sees fit for our children is worth it.

Turns out it is not.

Enter CBC

There is nothing that smells so good as new uniforms and bata shoes and a toddler jumping excitedly up and down in them, until you get to school. Soon as they realize the ruse and realize they are about to be abandoned with strangers for unknown periods of time for the first time in their lives and you have trouble.

As we prepared my son to join school, we started to reminisce about our own experiences with joining school. I remember being ushered into a big hall for my interview to proceed to pre-unit. I had done my nursery at some school very near home whose only memory was the food I ate there, which was really good.

But my parents thought better of it and decided it was better to have me and my younger brother join a catholic school near home. They believed that the school’s overall better performance in KCPE exams meant that they had good teachers who would improve our performance and we would get a chance to join decent high schools and in turn, good universities, and get decent jobs. That is how it worked in their time.

Even though it was my second time I cried the whole interview, probably because of the food but then they had me repeat nursery.

I was in good company because my mother in love also told me about how my lover took some time to adjust when joining school. She says he would cry when his father dropped him off, then he would just put his head on the desk and sleep, and was immovable until he was picked later in the day. And this apparently went on for a while.

Our son was no different, he was inconsolable the first few days, but after a while he now looks forward to playing on the swing, with his friends. Joining school was clearly a very big adjustment and life determining choice for our children.

Curriculum in turmoil

But somehow as we picked a school for our son we became acutely aware that maybe we were giving him the short end of the stick.

He would be joining an education system that we did not go through, and that is generally ‘new’ to the country with the first batch of CBC students completing junior secondary this year.

Kenya had taken on an ambitious project to change its education system in what was billed as an improvement in the quality of education, including the implementation of a Competency Based Curriculum, reforming teacher professional development, textbook policy, and improving management practices at the local level.

But in practice due to lack of funding none of these goals are being reached instead, most parents in the country, other than the homework they get to do for their children, and the adjustments in the number of years one would spend in primary or secondary, adjustment in subjects and vague promises of talent nurturing and equality understand very little about how exactly the CBC works, myself included.

From conversations with teachers and other parents however, we had the feeling that it may not be what government leads us to believe. 

Private solutions to public problems

Teachers themselves are not confident about the value it will bring to our children, some claiming that 844 was better, and talks of confusion in schools where some teachers are not trained to teach CBC and some don’t have teachers for Junior secondary.

So we decided we would go with what we can control for the most part, and pick a school that is near home and offers co-curricular activities such as music, art, swimming, and coding just to mention a few which we would sign up our son as we try to catch and nurture his talents a young age and continue to teach him knowledge at home through encouraging him to read books, and teaching him basic concepts like mathematics, history, languages, and sciences that we learned in school. 

How this will be practical is doubtful given the struggles of adulting, and the limitations of our own knowledge, it is simply unsustainable.

Some scholars are even suggesting we call ourselves to a meeting and stop this madness that may damn an entire generation.

Turn to critics

As I was doing some research I came across Mwalimu Wandia, an Associate Professor of Literature who loves to stretch academic boundaries and think outside the box and enjoys the intersection of creativity and technology according to her LinkedIn profile.

She has been openly against the CBC system. I watched a podcast where she explained Kenya’s history with education, how it was used by colonizers and how CBC came about. 

From antiquity until about one century ago, almost all education was provided by private organizations or individuals and paid for by the recipients. Education provided by the state is a recent phenomenon.

In Kenya education was first introduced by the missionaries to re-educate the natives. The colonial government only became involved later when they found a way of giving Africans access to basic competence-based education rather than the knowledge-based education that had made the Indians resist British rule. 

It had been tested in America where the Negros were given watered-down curriculum because science had proven their cranium- skulls were racially inferior to retaining knowledge-based education.

When the declaration of the emancipation of slaves in America was announced, Africans fighting for their rights wanted citizenship, an education, to take their kids to school. This worried their industrialists, afraid that they would not work for them anymore. So, they decided the Africans would get technical education/ vocational training, and knowledge education would remain for the elites, white people.

Black District Schooling in Africa

The vocational training would teach them the bare minimum, competence and no skills, they would learn to accept their position as slaves/artisans and not thinkers, or rulers in society. They brought the same system to their settler colonies, including Kenya.

So, the colonialists set up elite schools where their people would get a knowledge-based education, and the other schools would be for the Africans who would learn competence, i.e. to read and write. This meant that colonialists would remain the ruling class, to make the decisions, and Africans would be taught to learn our place at the bottom of the hierarchy, meant to serve the white man.

As colonialism became unpopular and we gained our independence, there was a need to create an African ruling class to take over the British and more Africans, mostly the elite chosen by the white man, who would lead came into knowledge-based education.

However, other schools would aspire for education like in the elite schools, and they took up the teaching models.

A levels system, the one to come after the CBC then was 7 years primary, 4 years secondary, 2 years high school then university for three years. This system worked for some people, however, the marginalized communities were not so lucky since most of their schools did not have high schools, meaning they had to compete for the same spots as the more privileged in society whose secondary schools had high schools and were more likely to be accepted into them.

President Moi who came from a small village understood the discrimination of this system since there were more secondary schools than high schools, which were legacy schools dominated by the prominent in society.

So when he came to power, he changed the system and did away with the 2 years of high school, so people would do secondary 4 years, do their exam, and proceed to university.

IMF stop prescription

President Moi’s project was quite successful. It brought about some equality in the system and in turn doctors, engineers, and architects were coming from all over the country, including smaller villages, unlike before when these prestigious jobs were kept only for the elites.

Growth in enrollments at all levels surged through the 1960s and 1970s, encouraged partly by the abolition of public school fees and the provision of free milk in primary grades. Also, enrollments in Harambee or community schools, whose growth was never restricted by the central government, grew rapidly during this period.

This growing belief regarding equal opportunity, with education perceived as promoting egalitarianism; was a significant contributor to nationalism as well as to economic growth and development would soon be curtailed by limitations on funding.

It made global elites uncomfortable, over what would happen to clear divisions by class that they had worked so hard to build.

Then the opportunity presented itself, as governments struggled to meet budgets following economic upheavals in late 80’s. The IMF came to Africa and demanded that subsidizing education ends or comes under limitation so that only those who could pay get access to education, retaining the order and hierarchy. 

The impact was quite visible, growth slowed and then reversed in the 1980s, with the gross primary enrollment rate falling from 115 percent in 1980 to 91 percent in 1993.

Same difference

Just like in our time the reaction was to rush into private schooling. Studies show that enrollments in private schools have accelerated dramatically since the 1980s, while they have stagnated in public schools.

Over the years the costs borne by parents of public and private secondary schools have become very similar. Parents now pay for about two-thirds of the cost of public secondary schools, while the Government finances only about one-third.

As the vocal parents who had money and a say went private slowly the government began comparing public schools to private ones and started informally raising tuition fees that today, the cost of public school is near similar to private education.

As public schools and universities see their per-pupil subsidies cut back due to Government budget constraints, they are left with little option but to generate their own income through raising fees, especially for recurrent cost financing.

Global labour movements

When Kibaki came to power in the 2000s, the west had just announced through the WTO that trained personnel should be a form of consumer goods and open to the global market.

This was an era of labour mobility as white people worried about aging and falling population realized they needed cheap migrant workers for their industries.

President Kibaki aware of this new world that required basic training reduced the subject overload in the 8-4-4 system and made education ‘free for all’ increasing gross enrollment rates to 78 percent in early-childhood education and 70 percent in secondary education (whilst remaining above 100 percent in primary).

But even then the system was built to maintain the hierarchy where local education, even in private schools was deemed inferior. According to Learning Adjusted Years of Education (LAYS) on average, 11.6 years of education, which, when adjusted by the level of learning relative to other countries, results in 8.4 effective years of schooling.

The West however maintained domination in education making sure what is perceived as quality schools come from their countries, the US and Europe.

Now all elites in our local countries had to have passed through their schools abroad in order to come back to their countries and run institutions. They had found a way to set apart the classes of elites and well the lower in the hierarchy.

Return of the Competence-Based Curriculum.

However, the anxiety of educated people demanding a revolution looms over them and there is now pressure to reform the school system to offer less to the students unless they want to pay more.

They needed to reduce learning in schools so that we come out with less knowledge so we are unable to challenge the system that was clearly created to oppress us while it elevates them. 

They sold us Kenyans the idea that we need an education system where people learn to be competent, unlike 8-4-4 where graduates enter the workplace without competence. They claimed that graduates did not have jobs because they were not competent, most of them went into workplaces green, or could not be hired because of lack of experience. This new system would change that.

They promised it would bring about equality by removing exams, which they claimed was not a fair way to assess students’ performance.

They said CBC would identify and nurture our children's talents from a young age, and in an era where capitalism promises that we become the most successful when we tap into our talents and passions, our children would not have to worry about making money since they had talent.

They said this system would encourage parental involvement, solving the issues of children being unruly due to absent fathers, or mothers.

Kwa ground

What they didn’t tell us however is that it is the same vocational training that was used in colonial days to ‘domesticate’ us.

Competence does not mean skill, it is the standard used for TVET.  It would mean our children would learn the bare minimum. Denying them chance to expand their minds and gain knowledgeable education and skills. To accept their place lower in the hierarchy as technicians to be exploited and not thinkers.

They could not risk having a generation so aware of their rights that would bring about a revolution, kind of like what we have witnessed with the Gen Z protests.

Upon implementation, Kenyans quickly came to realize that we were creating a very unequal society. First, the government could not afford the cost of setting up infrastructure for this new education which meant that the days of High schools with facilities and the rest of schools without facilities was back.

While the new system needed more resources the government reduced funding during crucial years when Covid-19 kept learners away despite being warned that without funding the sector would collapse. World Bank said Kenya reforms cannot be implemented without adequate resources and there is a risk that the rapid expansion of the student population will result in worse quality of education services if the resources do not keep up with enrollment.

For the parents today, who are aware of what our history holds, we need to make better choices for our children. It is at this tender age, as they are developing that education is most integral. 

Like Trans Nzoia Governor George Natembeya said, "It's like some people sat some-where and decided to sabotage the future of children because we all know that it's ·education which equals all of us in life."