It is better to guard the learning process than the exams

The noise from the American elections is about to go down now that Election Day is around the corner. It is indeed such a noisy election season that Hamid Dabashi, an Iranian-American professor at Columbia University recently described it as, “the epitome of a disgraceful public spectacle of corruption on one side and neo-fascism on the other.” You can’t blame him for coming to such a harsh conclusion considering that it is an election where name calling has surpassed policy presentation. Issues like climate change have given way to “Crooked Hillary and her deleted emails vs Donald the guy who wants to grab women’s genitals and has a bone to pick with bad hombres.” The foreign policy talk has been reduced to allegations of Russia hacking US servers and the wall that Mexico will finance. At this point all I can say is that may the least undesirable candidate win. In East Africa the noise was replaced with silence as many candidates (not presidential) sat for what they have been brought up to believe are the most important examinations in their life. One key reminder of what the period of examinations was like in my school days was that ubiquitous notice “Silence, Exams in Progress.” It was often placed a few metres from the block of classes that were being used for examinations. If you were not partaking in the exams at that time, you were expected to shut your mouth and often find another route to use the moment you saw that notice. Over the years the stakes have gone so many notches high that children literally spend all their time in school preparing for the final exam. Some opt to cheat not by copying from those sitting next to them but by accessing the exams before and preparing with the precision of a Swiss clock maker. Now I want us think about this. Somewhere in Kenya, two police constables shot at each other with G3 rifles after an argument. Forget the argument; these two were on duty guarding a KCPE Examination Container. Yes we need guns to guard examination centres. It is now more than just an education matter, it is a security issue. If you do not guard exam material with guns then you will lose the whole exercise to the cheating cartels. This security comes from the fact that we have placed so much value on examinations and resultant certificates than the learning process itself. We have reached a point where it could be easier to steal some of the land (playgrounds tend to be on high demand lately) belonging to the school than the examination materials. In our minds the playground is not as important as the examinations. We just want our children to get straight A’s and go on to live happily ever after. Or so we think. We have placed so much importance on examinations because we have narrowed our perception of what education is. According to Sir Kenneth Robinson, a British educationist, education should essentially be about helping people to discover their talents and nurturing those talents. Surely our education systems should not entirely be about who is most talented at memorising what was taught in class and reproducing it in a couple of hours during an exam. Another important thing to think about is that fact that the world is always changing so fast that by the time many leave school, what they were taught soon becomes obsolete thanks to the first paced technological advancements and other social dynamics. In other words, the most important thing we should be giving our children is the unending curiosity to seek knowledge more than certificates to prove they passed exams. We should guard anything that facilitates learning whether it is the sports facilities of a school, the library, the music and art rooms or the welfare of the teachers. Anyone who steals school land or school property is stealing our children’s future and should be treated with all the contempt we can assemble. Lastly, I must say it is sad to see that Makerere University has been closed indefinitely after a strike by lecturers sucked in the students too. Given its historical significance on this continent, I would have loved for it to be a beacon of hope and stellar management resulting in ground breaking research and skilled graduates to serve in the country, the region and the world itself. We really have to fix our education systems if we still want to compete in this fast changing world.

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It is better to guard the learning process than the exams