Monday, January 23, 2012

Grades at any cost



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Posted  Sunday, January 22  2012 at  15:34
Whenever Ms Lily Rotich looks at the mound under which lies her daughter Mercy Chebet, she sees the folly of our education system.
It all began two days after Education Minister Sam Ongeri performed his annual ritual of announcing the best and poor performers in the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education exams.
“There were no indications that she would take her life,” recalls a distraught Lily, still yet to come to terms with the loss of her daughter.
Mercy, 14, hadn’t strayed into the world of adult games and exposed her family to ridicule and dishonour. She hadn’t broken any law of the land.
So, what sin did the Ketitui Primary School pupil from Kericho County commit?
She scored 145 marks out of a possible 500 in KCPE.
“I don’t know why she waited until the exams were out,” her mother regrets.
Mother thought daughter was being cheeky when she threatened to kill herself rather than live with the results.
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Half an hour later, Mercy was dangling on a sarong (leso) from their kitchen roof.
Mercy had been jovial when she left with her friends to check the results, but, in her mother’s words, gloom set in when she saw her grades.
On hearing that repeating exam classes was out, the world collapsed around her. And she reached for the leso.
A similar tragedy also struck in Kathiani, Machakos County.
Sylvia Wanjiku, 14, scored 303 marks (an average of 60.6 per cent), but her target had been 400.
Had that 60.6 per cent been a university grade, it would have been an Upper Second Class Honours, meaning she would have had a chance to pursue a masters degree and then a PhD.
Local police boss Richard Kerich later told journalists that the ambitious girl’s suicide note read: “Dear Mum, I have let you down in this world without 400 marks.”
Ten days later, the grades-at-any-cost mentality claimed a third life when Tony Muiya from Kiamunyeki village in Nakuru County hanged himself inside his parent’s two-bedroom house on a Monday evening.
Tony was “unhappy” with a teacher for forcing him to repeat class. The lad, his mother said, had been forced to repeat Class Six because he had scored 218 points, 32 away from the 250 pass mark. Thirty two marks less and a life was lost.
And it’s not just pupils who are choosing this tragic path.
On January 4, a headteacher in Narok County killed himself after he learnt that the Kenya National Examination Council had cancelled the results of his pupils.
The body of Kalyet Primary School head, identified by the police as Mr Geoffrey Sigei, was found in a farm, days after escaping the wrath of irate parents.
That ire almost went viral across the country. Parents in Meru and Kwale counties either locked headteachers in their offices or barred them from entering their schools.
In Nyeri, a teacher was quietly tilling her farm when assailants confronted her over ‘poor results’.
She could not explain to the satisfaction what had happened. For that, she was clobbered her to death.
"Threatening messages trickled into my mobile phone and it was physically demonstrated and declared that I was persona non grata in the region; I had to run away for my dear life.”With the macabre spirit sweeping through the country, a teacher, whom we shall only call Patrick to mask his identity, wrote to us of his ordeal, part of which read: “I revealed cheating schemes in my station and I almost lost my life. I was branded a betrayer, anti-student, anti-community…. I had to run away from the hostility that resulted from my bold step of scuttling the cheating.
But, why would an examination meant to test the ability of pupils in grasping what they have learnt in school be a death warrant?
Why, still, would teachers be punished if these pupils can’t pass?
At any rate, not all of them pass with flying colours anywhere in this world. And don’t educationists tell us that education is what remains after school?
In her book, The Schools We Deserve, American scholar Diane Ravitich observes that the “chief virtue of standardised tests is that they may serve as an early warning” so that teachers, parents and indeed the government can put in place measures to correct the low marks scored by a pupil.
According to her, examinations are so far the most objective means of identifying the ability of pupils in class, as compared to the archaic methods of, say, using one’s tribe, race, and wealth or family connections to determine who continues to learn in school.
But most educationists and behavioural specialists concede that, if performances in KCPE can produce suicides, then its purpose has failed.
Dr Sara Ruto, regional manager, Uwezo East Africa, an educational initiative that, among others, monitors educational trends in the region, observes that most pupils are under pressure to perform even when in poor learning environments. “Examinationmania,” she calls it.
“It has pushed down our children to the wall, it's everywhere and manifests itself in the way we receive results with fanfare or gloom and forget that examinations are not an end in themselves,” she says.
The problem, Dr Ruto argues, is born of our obsession with exams and the branding of those who score below the pass mark as un-smart.
“If you don’t fit in the normal curve, the Kenyan system has no place for you, but we should realise that not everyone was born to pursue academics,” she says.
The matter is worsened by parents who routinely put pressure on their children to pursue certain careers.
When those children fail to achieve the marks that would put them on the path to become medical doctors, pilots or engineers, they are regarded as failures.
“The current problem started eight years ago when we allowed so many children to go to school but didn’t change any other thing,” food science and nutrition specialist Prof Ruth Oniang’o told NTV a few days ago.
And Mr John Kageche, a personal development trainer in Nairobi, agrees, saying the practice of ranking and celebrating students, schools and counties on national platforms could be shifting our understanding of the purpose of education.“We have already condemned our children to death. KCPE is not okay because it has not been adjusted to fit into the current system.”
“Exam performance shouldn’t be a popularity contest, but that is what it is in this country. There is a high price to the habit.”
With time, he says examinations have ceased being an act of learning and have, instead, evolved into a popularity contest and a vicious fight for survival.
“We are telling young minds that education is a jungle out there; that it is about survival for the fittest.”
To end this tragic competition, Mr Kageche says we need to use the results as a way of identifying our problems in the system but “desist from the showy post-exam displays that make education a race.”
In normal circumstances, educationists insist that the role of a teacher should only amount to 25 per cent of a child’s success in school; that pupils should be guided and not spoon-fed on how to tackle their classwork.

This implies that parents too have a role of helping their children rather than waiting to stone teachers.
In last year’s KCPE, for instance, 7,974 candidates from 334 schools were found to have cheated. Their parents could not have been totally in the dark over this.
“Many parents in poor schools tend to be poor themselves,” argues former Trade minister Dr Mukhisa Kituyi.
“They cannot provide the extra facilities their peers elsewhere bring to the school and home for improved learning.
Children are often out of school during peak agricultural labour seasons to augment earnings,” he wrote in the Sunday Nation.
When free primary education was launched in 2003, many parents, according to Dr Kituyi, left all the responsibility of ‘teaching’ to teachers.
This is why they become frustrated and angry at teachers when their children cannot perform in schools, a place they sent their children to help alleviate poverty by getting jobs once they finish school.
In addition, Dr Lukoye Atwoli, a psychiatrist, says there is a psychological aspect to these suicides.
This last group might have seen low marks as another sign that their miseries would never end.According to him, there are two types of suicidal characters: those who take decisions impulsively and are quick to choose death as a solution, and those who have had problems throughout their primary school.
“We should encourage people to start to talk about these issues because it helps to avoid such incidents,” he says.
In The Schools We Deserve, Prof Ravitich admits that much of the pressures associated with exams emanate from the fact that “the results of the tests have far too significant an effect on the life chances of young people.”
But she adds that there is no need to panic when a child performs poorly in standardised examinations because they “are known to test only a narrow spectrum of abilities”.
“We send our children to school not in order to do well in tests, but in order to become educated people, knowledgeable about the past and present and prepared to continue learning in future,” she informs.

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