I Have Always Said It - Kenya's Education System Is Useless

News & Politics
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More than 40 per cent of students finishing Form Four in Kenya don’t meet the minimum basic literacy level of reading and writing, a World Bank Flagship report has revealed.

The illiteracy problem among the Form Four leavers, according to the WB’s World Development Report 2019, is attributed to the poor quality education.

The 151-page report groups Kenya, Ghana and Bolivia among countries whose high school leavers aged between 19 and 20 years score below the basic literacy level.

“This is a problem. Given the future of work, functional literacy is a survival skill. The economic and social cost of adult illiteracy to developing countries is estimated at more than US$5 billion (Sh500 billion) a year,” reads the report.

The findings come at a time when 664,587 students sit their KCSE exam from Monday.

Heavy investment in building schools - which is politically driven at the expense of ensuring there is quality education and competent teachers - is one of the factors causing students in the three countries to score below the literacy margin.

Read: 7.8 million Kenyans lack minimum literacy levels

“Governments favor spending more on the politically visible aspects of human capital such as constructing schools and hospitals. Campaigning politicians often promise new schools or hospitals but rarely do they discuss actual learning levels or stunting rates,” reads the report.

More than 2.1 billion people globally aged between 15 and 64 have low reading and writing skills despite working and 61 per cent of them are in Sub-saharan Africa, the report states.

A 2014 World Bank report on levels of literacy in Kenya showed that over 7.8 million ( 38.5 per cent) youth and adults in Kenya lack the minimum literacy levels required to participate in national development.

The 2019 World Bank Flagship report notes that adults who receive poor quality education find it difficult to get jobs just like school dropouts without formal certification and training.

It pokes holes in the poor curriculum of the education system which does not equip learners with relevant skills to meet the job market thus driving majority into informal employment.

Read: UN warn millions of pupils not learning even basic literacy, numeracy

“In Kenya, informal employment is a staggering 77.9 per cent of total employment - one of the highest rates on the African continent. Almost six million businesses in Kenya’s informal sector are unlicensed,” reads the report.

It adds that productivity is low in the sector, particularly in emerging economies and that informal workers are on an average of only 15 per cent as productive as their counterparts in formal employment.

Also Read: New 2-6-3-3-3 curriculum: How different is it from the 8-4-4 system?

https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2018/10/27/forty-per-cent-of-form-4-leavers-lack-basic-literacy-world-bank_c1841294

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Kenyans have generally low IQs. That’s the reason why.

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Am not a kenyan then…am an alien

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No. It has got nothing to do with IQ. It has got everything to do with a poor education policy. It also has got NOTHING to do with the amount of money spent of education.

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Poor Infrastructure, inadequate teachers, lowly paid teachers, lack of textbooks, exam oriented system et al. We agree?!!!

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Reading and writing in what language? I guess English ama? What if we change the policy to include our local languages like other progressive countries. In south Africa phds are now being written in Zulu and Xhosa. Ngugi wa thiongo saw this problem decades ago.

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I agree. We should actually make Swahili to be the medium of instruction. If you look at the report, which i’ve downloaded, North African countries are performing very well simply because many of them teach in Arabic. Sub-saharan countries are performing poorly because they are obsessed with teaching in a white man’s language.

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Lowly paid teachers compared to whom? Teachers in private schools are paid far less.
Teacher inadequacy comes because we want to professionalize teaching.
The private school that i went to was staffed by UT’s 90% (During those days, trained teachers used to get automatic employment with TSC)
Poor Infrastructure - Because we would rather buy laptops that build schools and buy books.

Remember, Kenya is the ONLY country in Africa that spends more than 7% of it’s GDP on education. In the Whole world, Kenyan Parents rank FIRST on the PERCENTAGE OF PRIVATE INCOME spent on education. A major paradox?
The government spends the most, the people spend the most: strange?

Where does all this money go?

One of the major problems is the medium of instruction.

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From the report: “Another textbook program, in Kenya, had no impact on learning, most likely because most students did not fully understand the language in which the books were written.”

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“Regional learning assessments—which include many more low- and lower-middle-income countries—also show how inconsistent the association between spending and learning can be. For example, public spending per primary school student increased over the 2000s in both Kenya and Lesotho; yet student learning outcomes improved in Lesotho but declined in Kenya”

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Human capacity is the problem, that’s what I tend to think. I have a0lways wondered though, when the Brits were conquering the world what was the literacy level in the UK ?
Same applies to Germany when there we raising temperatures all over the place. America became a great in the late 40’s, same with Russia

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Thought world fangi inadeal na pesa !
And we "are excellent in stealing ’

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Hii kenya masomo ni ya kurembesha eulogy .

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Even today, literacy levels in USA are still a little wanting - especially considering they call themselves the “greatest country on Earth!”

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I have specific fault with this though, must be my illiteracy.

61% of 2.1Billion people translates to 1.2Billion which is basically the entire African population. Yet they only mention that those are the ones in Sub-Saharan Africa. Either the World Bank were played or the research was done by The Star’s ugly sister Mharo.com

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Our kids will experience new curriculum, let’s wait as it’s rolled out to poke holes whether it’s effective or not

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Hehe. Very interesting. Here is an article on the same:

There was, moreover, an appreciable rate of growth in literacy. This is reflected in the fact that young persons were more and more accomplished than their elders. Thus an examination of educational attainments of males in the Navy and Marines in 1865 showed that 99 percent of the boys could read compared with their seniors: seamen (89 percent), marines (80 percent), and petty officers (94 percent).7

It is not surprising that with such evidence of literacy growth of young people, the levels had become even more substantial by 1870. On my calculations for 1880, when national compulsion was enacted, over 95 percent of fifteen-year-olds were literate.8 This should be compared to the fact that over a century later 40 percent of 21-year-olds in the United Kingdom admit to difficulties with writing and spelling.9

https://fee.org/articles/the-spread-of-education-before-compulsion-britain-and-america-in-the-nineteenth-century/

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True, the average score for mathematics and science subjects taken by the Kenyan student is higher than a South African student even though they spent more money educating their students.

This will not solve anything, we started publishing PhD’s in Swahili in Moi University kitambo kuwaliko, even students from Tanzania and Germany come to Moi university to read Swahili.

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It is generally agreed that the literacy rates were greater among free men before compusory schooling wa sadopted in the US. Massachessets had a literacy rate of 99% in the 1850’s

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Sasa kama walimu ni kina village idlers, what do you expect?