Thread by @wmnjoya

Grade 9 parents have been given this whatever called RIASEC which they are supposed to use in choosing career pathways and schools for their children.

I know we want to concentrate on our kids, but we're Africans. Nothing we are told to do is innocent.

So we have to understand where it's coming from, and why GoK bureaucrats, in their wisdom, decided that Kenyan parents should be subjected to it.

RIASEC is what people call psychometrics, where tests are used to measure people's intelligence or personalities.

Psychometrics are the offspring of scientific racism. Their roots are in 19th century attempts of Euro-American scientists to use tests prove that Africans were intellectually inferior.

And of course, they coincide with the end of slavery, when Africans start seeking education.

Exams are the older siblings of psychometrics. During colonialism, exams were used to supposedly test our intelligence, but as Mwiria wrote in "Education for subordination," Africans got harder questions and were failed in higher numbers to block them from advancing in school.

In other words, wazungu civilization depends on using numbers to pretend that their discrimination against Africans is "objective," or "scientific," when all numbers do is carry the discriminatory algorithms from the larger society.

After the struggles of the 1960s exposed Western science and law as racist, rather than "objective," the Western academy cooked a new alibi for discrimination. It was called "personality," in the larger field of psychology.

Now the West could learn to penetrate our subconscious and unconscious without us being aware. So they start telling us that our careers are decided not be socio-economic opportunities, but by our personality.

In comes John Holland with RIASEC.

This is now the psychoanalysis that @KICDKenya is expecting parents to apply to their children. And this is why I was warning parents in my other thread: DO NOT GIVE UP YOUR ROLE AS PARENTS. Your role as parents is not to be KICD, teachers, or now psychoanalysts of your children.

@KICDKenya The job of parents is to raise and nurture children who can relate intimately with others and remain well adjusted in the world. To affirm your children's identity as human beings and members of society Do not accept to be turned in pseudo-professionals and analyze your children.

The problem is that educated parents, especially, get flattered when we're equated to professionals in other fields. No, parents are parents; not psychoanalysts. You may know your child's personality, but it's not your job to codify it according to some lame American criteria.

Now to RIASEC.

This thing compartmentalizes the human personality and reduces it to something legible. It's a form of violence, especially for children because their personalities are not yet completely formed, but now they are being put in a box.

The other violence is that ALL human beings, and ALL careers, need some dimension of the different aspects of our humanity. Just the other day, we were talking about doctors who believe that telling the "truth" to patients requires being brutal and insensitive.

Yet in one RIASEC test I saw, doctors and surgeons were classified as "investigative" and nurses as "social." But the patient is the same! In other words, to doctors, patients are just specimens and nurses are there to cover up for their coldness. The gender biases are obvious.

I also looked at some of the questions, I was wondered: where would I fit in? For me, I joined the academy because I love study and knowledge, but also, I was tired of a chronically underinformed and miseducated Kenyan society. None of the options offered "I want freedom."

Mark you, I did not know that this is what I wanted when I was in my 20s. I know it now, based on my life's trajectory.

Why are children being forced to make career decisions about ourselves so early in life, when they barely know themselves? This is violence.

3rd thing to note: apart from the CAT marks and the psychometrics, the Ministry will still employ gender and regional quotas (and you know what else) in deciding who goes to which high school. Worst of all: all schools must offer STEM (aka TVET), but only 80% will offer the arts.

According to the initial projections of KICD in 2018, 60% of children must go into TVET. I asked KICD why they're talking of talent when at the same time, they've decided the pathway children must go into. Later, I noticed that the projections had been removed.

Now, to you the parent wondering: what do I do when I have to make the choice for my child?

Short of getting CBC removed and it's here to stay, what you need to do is be wise as a serpent and gentle as a dove (sorry, today is Sunday).

Do NOT take this process literally. Make the best of a bad situation and fill the forms as best you can. But do not define your child's personality and future by those documents. And I've been saying: you have to do the work of making up for the gaps.

Buy your kids books, tell them stories. What CBC is attacking is the ability to read the world in totality through treating the intellect, skill and personality as separate from each other.

Next year, do not blame your child for whatever GoK throws at them.

But most of all, the person who needs to change is YOU, the parent. 8 years ago, you were really naive, believing everything MoE said. Stop being naive, and understand what Gen Zs are fighting for, which is the end to the lie that our lives are determined only by our choices.

CBC is really a Western plan to limit what Africans can do, but cheating us that ideas are useless to real life, and what we need are only skills. The US has already exposed this. We either accept it, or we fight it.