Thread by @wmnjoya

To understand why we have a GERM (Global education reform movement) problem, it's important to understand the chaos of empire. #EducationcaptureKE #Thread

1. With the oil crisis of the 1970s, American profits reduced, and companies decided to compensate for that loss.

2. As all selfish corporates do, they look at workers' salaries and benefits as a waste of money, and decide to cut them off.

The problem is that the unions wouldn't let them get away with it.
#EducationCaptureKE

Side bar: What are unions?
Unions are groups of workers legally registered to negotiate for workers' pay and benefits. If unions go on strike, the law prohibits the employers from firing the workers.

Many of our disappearing rights were fought for by unions. #educationcaptureKE

3. So what do corporations do?

They lobby politicians to crush the unions so that workers cant negotiate (done by by Reagan and Thatcher).

Then they campaign for de-industrialization (done by Clinton). #educationcaptureKE

4. Where does that leave our Anglos?

With no industries, no work. Whole manufacturing towns are decimated (eg Detroit), and people are forced to work in service sector.

With no productive work, there's no produce to make money from. #EducationcaptureKE
dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6…

5. What does corporate team mafisi do next?

They start to salivate for social services. They look at public infrastructure like schools and hospitals as high value real estate, and at professionals like teachers and medics as labor for sale. #educationcaptureKE

6. But there's a problem: the public (parents and teachers) is not going to accept for the public schools of their kids to be reduced to business.

What do they do? Capture the narratives on education using the mainstream media. Turn parents against teachers. #EducationCaptureKE

7. With teachers' bargaining power reduced, they are given more bureaucratic work and less pay. US and UK are facing a teacher shortage because teachers just can't take abuse.

So there's a cohort of unemployed and experienced teachers. Where would they go? #EducationCaptureKE

8. GERM is made up of the same companies destroying education in UK & US spreading their gospel of team mafisi in developing countries.

Former teachers know where to hit and our education systems and they know the language of teachers. They can promote CBC.
#EducationCaptureKE

9. So they repeat the cycle in Kenya again. This time, they use former UK and US teachers to use the right words, respond to the arguments of teachers, and to write op-eds in the newspapers.

#EducationCaptureKE

10. Why was this capture so seamless in Kenya?

In the 1990s, a civil society emerged from the professional class to fight against tyranny. It should have been a temporary arrangement to open up even the economic space, not just the political one. #EducationcaptureKE

11. Unfortunately, the government transformed this safety valve into a permanent feature for managing political transition in Kenya.

Universities then started to train Kenyans to be permanent NGO professionals to absorb unemployed graduates. #EducationCaptureKE

12. Just like the US and UK teachers, we are now in a space where medics are trained for medical policy, not to treat. Artists and humanities are trained peace-building, not to create. Teachers are trained to work in GERM, not to teach.

12 cont. Researchers are consultants for Western industrial interests, not for knowledge creation. Professors are for regulating and inspecting universities, not for teaching.

So consultants have more say on education than the teachers themselves. #EducationCaptureKE

14. So why CBC?

CBC reduces knowledge to tasks, makes parents fill the gap with "involvement and teachers fill it with constant testing, makes kids busy with "fun" activities which don't enhance learning, paves the way for technology to replace teachers. #EducationCaptureKE

15. The biggest con that the media pulled off is to restrict the CBC conversation to expense. That's exactly where Team Mafisi wants us to be, because now you will demand for more public money to be put in schools.

Who benefits? Private schools.

#EducationCaptureKE

16. I used to think that Cambridge Analytica, tyranny of numbers was the biggest psychological manipulation pulled off in Kenya. I now see that CBC was much better and more effective, because the KYMs are professors and not rambling politicians. #EducationCaptureKE

17. With teachers, our guard is down. We don't expect them to be manipulated or manipulative. And the manipulation is not as direct.

There's no way to get out of this mess other than putting in the days and months to understand how we got here. #EducationCaptureKE

18. Sadly, kids wont stop growing as they wait for us to understand. But the mess is so entangled and convoluted, that if we want a quick fix, we are going to make things worse. The work we have to do is like disentangling wires slowly by following each wire #EducationCaptureKE

19. What we needed was not a taskforce on TVET, but a Commission to write a philosophy of education (Kenya doesn't have one), then do an investigation of how we got CBC, not remedy CBC. Then we shut off the vulnerabilities of Kenya's education space. #EducationCaptureKE

20. For now, all we can do is tell stories. Tell our kids our stories as a medicine against the fragmentation of CBC. But we too must repair our own knowledge of our stories, and heal the stories we tell education.

God willing, this is my last post about CBC.
#EducationCaptureKE