Thread by @wmnjoya

We are witnessing a worrying trend where universities are offering applied skills but cutting down on the training in the actual skills. The UK, especially, offers many more scholarships in these applied fields rather than in the fields themselves.

A few examples.

Communication is applied arts, yani using artistic techniques to communicate. But few universities offer arts programs themselves, and pirate sector and GoK are at the forefront of fighting the arts. That means, for example, film makers study cameras but not stories.

This means that the film industry will keep struggling to tell stories that capture the Kenyan imagination. And that we will never see biopics or our history on screen, because film makers don't study history anyway. History is "irrelevant to the market."

The problems with communication from @MOH_Kenya is an arts problem. An inability to read people's mood, to anticipate the kind of questions people will ask, and lecturing us like criminals. These skills taught in irrelevant subjects of anthropology, linguistics and literature.

Second: engineering.

Pirate sector and GoK keep telling Kenyans that we need engineers. But to train engineers, you need mathematicians and physicists. But those especially, are struggling with getting graduate students and resource support.

The engineers can tell us how that affects the quality of the skills.

3. Health

We are seeing more graduate degrees that are teaching health business, administration and policy, and to non-medics. The goal of this degree is to train health bureaucrats, which will increase administrative bloat, where health decisions will be made for admin reasons.

Worse is that the policy curricula is not grounded in African history and in global reality.

The point is to have our health system flooded with policy makers with foreign political orientarion, and few opportunities for our medics to grow in actual medical skills.

4. Education

TSC used to have a terrible policy of giving study leave only if one is studying education administration. The fields of especially educational philosophy are really struggling. That's why the folks at KICD could not answer the question "why do we educate."

That's why KICD can't understand the philosophical and psychological problems with "parental involvement." Dr Jwan, who led the system change, did his studies on prefects and school discipline.

If we continue with this trend, we will soon have no skilled people who are free to do their work without being policed by a bureaucrat. And since these policy driven degrees are grounded in Western capitalism, professionals will be being policed by Western commercial interests.

That is how we have health and education policies written abroad and then we're told to implement them here, and questioning the policy is "attacking" the implementator.

Anglo-American anti-intellectualism is still going on with these degrees.

My advice to our young people:

Don't do any policy driven degrees. Learn the skill. And don't get into policy kabla hujafanya kazi kwa ground. This policy obsession is used by foreigners to weaken our skills and then we can't challenge foreign policy when it's brought here.

People will mock you like they mocked me (and still do) because I took arts subjects. But where are these "relevant" degree holders when I ask for a debate on the education system?

Don't become them, running away from us professionals. Learn a skill in arts or science first. END