Thread by @wmnjoya

Kenyans don't realize what madharau "competence" is. Competence is not what you think. You think it's about ability to do a job well. But that's not what competence is.

Competence is bare minimum skills. It's not excellence. It is not creativity.
#CBCmustfall

If someone is employed to be an editor but cannot write, that's incompetence. It means the person lacks the basic skills of an editor.

But you can have a person who can write and edit well, but is not suited to edit a biology book because of their limited knowledge in biology.

That is not incompetence. It is simply the limits of that person's knowledge. You can either take them for a biology class or get someone else with biological knowledge. But to call that editor incompetent is a stretch.

The same thing with education.

If a child can write legibly, that's competence. But if a child can draw calligraphy by hand, that's excellence. If a child cannot draw calligraphy, that does not mean the child is incompetent in writing. It just means the child cannot draw calligraphy.

And calligraphy is not required skill, for us to now panic and say "our kids cannot write!"

So if you want competence, you don't replace the syllabus. You teach better, because lack of competence isn't about no creativity and all that nyef nyef KICD was telling you.

Lack of competence is lack of the BASIC skills. So you teach the basic skills better. You don't teach competence.

@KICDKenya failed spectacularly when it did not do the work of defining the unstable idea of competence, even when we pressed them to.

Instead, KICD borrowed sound bytes from Sir Ken Robinson's videos to make competence look fantastic and open to possibilities.

But that is not what competence is. And that's why in competence, we're measuring children by the teachers' expectations.

If the teacher doesn't have high expectations of your child, that's where the child will reach.

So KICD telling you that competence will nurture a child's talent should be classified as the education lie of the century.

Competence is a ceiling and a pathway to limit where your child can go. It's not those white middle class dreams of dancing ballet and drawing God which Sir Ken Robinson gave you in his Ted Talks.

Competency tells our kids that they can only go so far.
#cbcmustfall

When employers say that graduates are incompetent, that was not reason enough for GoK to panic and start scampering for a new curriculum. They should have asked the employers "in exactly what are the graduates incompetent?"

Let's go back to the editing example.

If the publishing employer tells me "the graduate didn't know the difference between veins and capillaries," I would have told them, in my government voice, to stop being stupid.

If the editor can't remember that stuff, give her opportunities to remember what they were taught in secondary school. Send her to google or give her a basic biology book. But to start tantrums about the problems with our schools because she can't remember high school biology?

We should not change an education system because employers, of only 2m Kenyans, are kicking tantrums like brats. And as they kick tantrums, they are trying very hard to reduce that number of 2m to 200 CEOs and everybody else ni kibarua, or what they poshly call "gig economy."

My point is that Kenyans have to grow up, shed off the colonial measurements of education such as jobs and employers. Either we have an education system for people to thrive, or for a few employers to thrive. You can't have both, because employers don't want we Kenyans to thrive.

Employers want 2 skilled people for every 20 million semi-skilled and unskilled workers. Instead of us breaking that equation, we're sending kids to the CBC slaughter house in the hope that they will be lucky to be one of the 2.

Sorry Kenyans. They won't.

But like betting companies, the political class is happy to send you kid on a dead end and figure out what to do when you kids is 16. That's when DCI will start threatening your kid and the church will tell you that it's your job as a parent to be "involved" in your child's life.

We must stop feeling so helpless that only GoK and employers can make demands of the future. We too can make demands about the kind of PEOPLE we want our kids to be, and the future we want for them.

Our ancestors fought because they knew what they wouldn't accept for their kids.

Our ancestors were making demands of the future. We need to do likewise.

#cbcmustfall