Ken Ouko
10 February 2008
opinion
Nairobi — The Kenyan example in education shines in Africa. One would therefore expect the ordinary Kenyan to be in pole position to display the benefits of education. But, sadly, the post-election crisis has exposed the ordinary Kenyan as "uneducated" as his ruling class supremo.
Sociologists say education is not about acquiring credentials by sequential or syllabised ascendancy. Rather, to be educated is to display an admirable interactive suavity that is complemented by the ability to interact with others without posing a danger to them. The political crisis has thus revealed that our educational institutions have failed in making Kenyans an educated lot.
In my sociology classes, I tell my students that if by the end of one's time in campus he is still the village night-runner, or the celebrated village wife inheritor, or even the champion village infidel, it would not be inaccurate to conclude that despite his degree, he remains largely uneducated!
The import of this illustration is to make my students understand that the foremost function of education is to "de-villagise" the mind. By this I mean that we cannot claim to be educated or knowledgeable if we still behave like some pre-modern villager.
Unfortunately, that seems to be the case. Kenyans seem to have been living under the illusion of peace. We only needed the faintest negative stimulus to revert to our pre-modern village mentality. The word "primitive" rapidly went out of scholarly and linguistic fashion because of its connotative symbolism of derogatory reference to a group of people.
Sociologists point out that what one ethnic group may consider "primitive" remains of cultural and conventional significance to another ethnic group. This thus implies that reference to a people as "primitive" remains socially repugnant.
Yet what we have seen on our television screens over the past few weeks cannot point to anything else. The weapons of choice during the "skirmishes" (I find this a gross understatement!) are anything but a reflection of an educated people. Likewise, the methodology of fighting has battered our image of an educated lot. In keeping with trends of modernity and enlightenment, even murder has become sophisticated (and dare I add, less gruesome). Not so in the Kenya of 2008.
Anyone watching TV would imagine Kenyans are savages caught in a time warp of primitivism. None of the people I have talked to and the leaders I have heard speak about this violence (including President Kibaki and Mr Raila Odinga) have any semblance of a logical analysis of the genesis, synthesis and antithesis of what ails us.
As it were, when we speak amongst ourselves, an intelligent mind will easily read "ethno-traditional" thinking masquerading as objectivity. When our leaders speak, the ear of intelligence is immediately deafened by the cacophony of self-interests masquerading as patriotism and populism.
Another prime benefit of education is in its ability to integrate people who previously never knew each other. By its circumstantial nature, institutionalised education easily brings people from all walks of life together and integrates them in such a way as the other institutions hardly can.
School and collegiate alliances are the best illustrations of cross-gender and cross-ethnic existences. It is in the education system where, as we learn to read, write and understand, we also acquire the ability to look beyond our immediate family for friends, acquaintances and spouses. Education thus enables people to live together and exist productively.
The best evidence that a given group of people is educated is their ability to make ends meet at the personal and collective levels. In the process, educated folk must exhibit enlightened interactive fluidity that is oiled by the very fact of being educated on the basics of coexistence. Evidently, Kenyans are pathetically lacking in this department.
More than anything else, education drives and guides change. For a people to achieve any meaningful socio-economic or political change, they must benefit from the ability to make informed decisions generated from a vantage point of educated access to information regarding the means, processes and options available for achieving such change.
In regard to this function of education, Kenyans exhibited signs of full benefit by displaying a mastery of the electoral process and using such generated knowledge to enhance their participation in the December 2007 elections.
Paradoxically, it emerged that the most "uneducated" lot in the whole electoral process were commissioners of the Electoral Commission of Kenya. Their collective or separate statements, jokes and reactions to serious issues arising from a process whose sanctity they were entrusted to safeguard represented no less than an assault on their claim to intellectual evolution. The chaotic scenes at the KICC likewise only revealed the total lack of benefit from the function of education that inculcates decency, decorum and suavity.
Lastly, perhaps the loudest evidence that Kenyans are a totally "uneducated" lot was the massive deployment of the Red Berets around KICC. For whatever reason it may have been done, this was an announcement to the world that we are yet to evolve to the point of treating elections and election results with due civility as would be expected of an educated citizenry.
Ken Ouko is a lecturer at the University of Nairobi.
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