Few will mourn 8-4-4 death, but let us not make same mistakes

It is a great pity that a government initiative that should have given rise to a robust debate with parents, teachers and educators exchanging views on how to make the new education system work has been overshadowed by a strike waged by people whose sworn duty is to save lives, but who feel they have suffered for too long under successive uncaring governments.

The strike by medical professionals is hurting badly, especially as it is only the very poor who are writhing in pain or dying of neglect.

The only hope is that by the time this column is published, the issues that led to the strike and the reasons for the stalemate between the government and the unions representing doctors and nurses will have been resolved.

But then, although it does sound rather callous to say so in a situation where many patients are in dire straits, life must go on and in the next few days, stakeholders in the education sector will meet to endorse perhaps the most audacious reform of the past three decades.

Certainly, few will mourn the gradual death of the 8-4-4 system, which was introduced with noble intentions, but whose implementation clearly failed.

I am a product of the 7-4-2-3 system and, therefore, not as qualified as I would like to be to comment on the shortcomings of 8-4-4.

Nevertheless, Kenyans have for a long time wanted to get rid of the system.

This is not necessarily because it produced dunderheads — most specialists and professionals working in Kenya and abroad today are products of the system — but because of what it failed to achieve.

NARROW MINDEDNESS
In a nutshell, the 8-4-4 system was meant to foster self-reliance amongst those of its products who could not qualify for university education.

In that it failed significantly.

Few Form Four leavers today are equipped with the skills to either employ themselves, or to make them readily employable, and so the only reason why the 8-4-4 system was supposed to be superior to its predecessor proved abortive.

Maybe educationists will, in simple language, tell us why such a noble idea turned to ashes.

But we can hazard a few guesses.

The first is that the national examination became the most important milestone in a child’s life, for the grade attained gradually turned into the only measure of success or failure in later life.

The fixation on examinations has been roundly condemned especially in the context of the cheating epidemic that had, until this year, gripped this country by the neck.

So any system that would get rid of that obsession should be welcome.

This is because few teachers saw the need to equip students with those life skills that would make them self-reliant in the future.

All that mattered was that the students pass exams and earn places in top secondary schools or to university.

The result, as many have pointed out, is that the students crammed for high grades instead of seeking knowledge, and even went to the extent of making cheating a way of life.

BETTER SYSTEM
The second reason was that at the basic level, pupils were over-burdened with subjects that allowed little freedom of choice or much relaxation.

The sight of a Standard Two pupil running to school at 6am carrying an oversize bag crammed with books was always an aberration.

When that happened daily, and the same child could not do a simple sum, then one could only wonder at what we were doing.

The point here is that the 8-4-4 system was introduced with the best of intentions but along the way, it started creating functional illiterates.

This time round, we should ensure we never come to rue our enthusiasm for the proposed 2-6-6-3 system.

It has many attractive features, but it may, in time, face so many hurdles of interpretation that it becomes yet another costly failure.

* * * *
Last week, I made a terrible blooper when I suggested that I was ready to “eat humble crow” should my speculation that the Opposition coalition has already picked on a flag-bearer be proved wrong.

I must confess I have never come across a crow that showed any humility, but I have eaten a few pies in my time.

So when I realised that you can either eat crow or humble pie but never both at the same time, my only response was, Ouch!

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