Last night, @citizentvkenya did this university education bashing based on speculation.
They said that of the scandalous 143,000 who obtained the entry C+ grade, 15k "chose" not to go to uni, and of those, and 4k "chose" TVET. #CitizenWeekend
Let's look at the data for a moment.
How did @citizentvkenya decide that the kids who did not pick university did so out of choice? I have personally interacted with kids who didn't do university applications because of misleading information from the school. #CitizenWeekend
Wouldn't the logical thing to do be for @citizentvkenya to look for those kids and ask them why they are not going to university?
And then, 5k of 150k is 3%. How are 3% a comment on university education? #CitizenWeekend
The story of "everyone wants a degree to get a job" just isn't backed by the research. A survey done by Prof Sifuna said that majority of university students want to go into self-employment.
The promotion of self employment has worked, @citizentvkenya. Why are you still whining?
Also, that story of "go to school, get a job" was of the 1950s and 60s. And it was true then, because the colonialists were handing over to Africans and desperate for literate Africans. The song #somenivijana was composed in 1958. 63 years ago! @citizentvkenya#CitizenWeekend
How are grandchildren of that generation still repeating a story that is long past its sell-by date? It means this: the ruling elite and its media PR machine are determined to maintain the colonial economy as its model of economic development. @citizentvkenya#CitizenWeekend
The colonial economy is based on hierarchy: those who go to uni and do well socially must always be the minority.
But there has to be a story why this is normal, which is that university spoils Africans, anyway. Which is the racist ideology of colonial times. #CitizenWeekend
So the real issue is the economy. We have an economy that doesn't allow Kenyans to grow their work and talent because the economy is run by people who have no skills and dont work. What work has Muigai and these sons of paramount chiefs and politicians ever done? #CitizenWeekend
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The word "competency" on CBC is an empty signifier. It doesn't answer the question "competency at what?" So we all come to CBC thinking that it means competency at whatever we like. That's dangerous because it means we're all expecting different things from the same concept.
I talked about that problem of hearing different things like the proverbial six blind men around an elephant. Everybody who defends CBC defends it based on what they individually think Kenyans need, rather than on what the curriculum actually means.
The founders of "competency education" two centuries ago were industrialists who were clear what they wanted: workers with skills in the area of employment and nothing else. No critical thinking, no social knowledge. That's why American educators rejected it. 3 times.
Gichuru displayed his upper class sensibilities. On one hand he says learning should be for jobs so kids should go to TVET, but when it comes to his own kids, suddenly learning is about play and a "lifetime experience."
And then Gichuru goes on about how universities have become too bureaucratic. But whose fault is that? BUSINESSES. That nonsense of work-ready graduates promoted by parasite sector has scared universities away from doing any innovative curriculum. #citizenweekend
There seems to be a clot in the Kenyan brain that blocks people from seperating economic problems from education. The #Somenivijana story of going to school for employment was for an exclusive to the colonial civil service and foreign companies. It was not the general economy.
The British caved in to higher education for Africans because it wanted to train a Kenyan civil service that would serve British interests after 1963. That is why uni education got attached to employment. The civil service is a parasitic enterprise. It doesn't grow the economy.
Because the civil service doesn't grow the economy, it soon ran out of employment positions. That was when they 1) said civil servants were allowed to do business and 2) started this evil propaganda of telling Kenyans "rudi mashambani" and stop seeking employment #somenivijana
The problems Chimamanda talks about are not limited to social media. And they don't come from a character flaw. They are the fruit of the neoliberal hijack of social change which she also benefited from. So those who attack her, as she unwittingly admits, are her disciples.
As an arts teacher who has challenged Kenya's colonial education system, I can tell you that under this neoliberal era, we have given nothing to our young people to help them read life in its complexity. To expect otherwise is to seek to reap where we have not sown.
Every time Kenyans repeat that nonsense about arts having no "relevance," and of reducing education to job market and economic success, they are planting the seeds of the fruit Chimamanda now criticizes: entitlement, puritanical vision of life, little emotional intelligence etc.
One big cause of mental unwellness is the clash between our human instinct to care and heal, and the workplace on the other. It's called emotional labor.
Emotional labor causes so much internal pain because there is a government and PR machinery to deny that it exists.
Imagine feeling emotional and mental anguish from gaslighting at work, and then when you talk about it, the PR guy at @MOH_Kenya, who is directly responsible for the pain, denies reality and says that the problem is with you. That's mental anguish x2.
The assault of such neoliberal policies at the workplace has been called by researchers a form of "terror on the soul." It has been widely documented by researchers, but Oprah types want to tell us mental torture at work is unrelated to mental unwellness.
I didn't know Wahura Kanyoro. But upon reading what she wrote, I am angry, not sad. And when I read people talking about beefing up mental health treatment and discussing depression, I'm even angrier.
This is what she wrote in December 2020.
There was a very clear catalyst for Wahura's sorrow. It was a country whose government has so much contempt for medical workers who get trained and work hard to help us maintain our health.
How are they treated? Wahura was very clear.
She said working in public healthcare "was slowly killing me to work as a precursor to the morgue instead of as a doctor." Put yourself in Wahura's shoes. You're trained to protect life, but you are reduced by a cruel @MOH_Kenya to be an escort for the end of life.