Sometime in late August, I made a trip to my home sub-county of Funyula, in Busia County, where I sparred with a group of teacher friends on the new Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC). As in the rest of the country, opinion was and remains divided.
Proponents of the CBC hold that it is the best for students’ vocational growth and fulfilment. Critics, however, think of it as impractically anachronistic and old fangled. The country, seemingly, is at a crossroads, not only on the political front, but also on the educational one.
What factors should, then, inform and determine prescription for a new curriculum? This question summons up the one point that many miss in the raging debate on CBC. It is imperative that the educational policy makers put into account the vocational interests and bent of the student.
It is equally important, however, that we negotiate and settle on a curriculum that helps us strike a working balance between the interests of both the student and country.
It makes a lot of sense, economically, to want to invest in a curriculum that ultimately churns out able, competent and optimally productive workers for the country. And investment in one’s occupational forté is certain to yield both personal and national growth.
Death knell
One good side effect of the CBC is the less ballyhooed fact that it sounds the death knell for the long-standing culture of parents foisting their own careers of choice on their children. The curriculum gives children and learners unprecedented opportunity to fully own the choice of what to do with and become in their lives.
Our young people can and shall now incarnate the one human condition about which the 16th US President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) made the following observation: productivity is a triumph of liberty.
Some of the world’s greatest and most developed countries are so partly because society there has long embraced and hugely invested in individual vocational growth.
One only need consider their dominance of and performance at global championships, and how well they pay and reward their sportspeople, to see my point in microcosm.
In the West, for instance, such sports as football and basketball are a rich taxable area of the entertainment industry. And it’s worth mentioning that sports feats add to the subtly unifying factor of national pride and vicariousness, consequently helping bring down the artificial barriers of racism, cultural bigotry and ethnic jingoism.
This leads me to the role of education, type notwithstanding, in the forging and enriching of a people’s national being.
One philosophical sparring partner of mine often tells me that what stands between us, as a complex of disparate tribal groupings, and our becoming a nation is a candid conversation on our collective past, present and future.
In this context, the content of what’s taught to the children, and how, particularly the selection, by the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD), of books and literary works for students’ study at secondary school and college levels, could prove seminal.
Just like there were vernacular language studies at primary school level in the past, which saw learners steeped in cultural heritage and history, instruction geared towards, and that aids, the moulding of country through personal education and development might just lubricate our collective pursuit of peace, unity, equitable development, prosperity and an all-unifying national ethos. BY DAILY NATION
