Nairobi — SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH our school system, be it the 8-4-4, or 7-4-2-3 that some of us suffered. It goes back to the colonial days, when the British found it necessary to give some Africans just enough "education" to work as clerks and overseers on their farms.

The clerks earned wages, so they would afford a tin hut, bicycle, pants, shoes and stockings. Then envy set in. Soon, there was a mad rush to send children to school so that they would be "successful". The madness continues.

As a result, parents go hungry in order to send their children to school. Many visit physical and psychological injury on their children over poor grades.

Yet, once the children are out of college, they return home, unwilling to soil their hands doing manual work. All their lives, they have been told that they would get jobs in some corporation or ministry.

And because headteachers embezzle funds, school is where Kenyans learn their first lesson in corruption. Bullying in high school sows the seeds of violence. And public universities are where most students, suddenly plunged into a sea of "freedom", learn their first lessons in blaming, complaining and drug abuse.

No one needs a college education to succeed. We've been brainwashed by parents, teachers, government and society. And we've been brainwashed by academics who have laboured for years to create people who fit snugly into groups such as author, chef or journalist.

We've been cheated that education can only happen through sitting like zombies at a desk, and being talked at by academics -- people who can't achieve much besides designing Nyayo cars that don't ignite. Academics have gone through the trouble to ensure we believe the lie that the best education comes from crowded classrooms where we grasp little but bad manners and disease.

And they have managed to get employers to buy the lie that grades are the basis of hiring staff. By so doing, they have closed the doors in many fields to anyone who hasn't sat in a room like a good little robot for a quarter century.

ACADEMICS HAVE MADE DEGREES mandatory in design, social work and, sooner or later, politics, priesthood or parenthood. You can visualise them laughing as they embark on making degrees compulsory for undertakers, drivers, footballers and watchmen.

Academics are closing in on every field, because there is money in providing college education. Look at the queues at night in a college that has chanced upon a money-mint called "parallel" degree programme.

When President Moi ruled us, he referred to himself as "professor of politics", yet he didn't have a college degree. Bill Gates dropped out of college. So did British billionaire Richard Branson, who owns Virgin Atlantic. Did Denis Oliech need a degree to play football? Did the people who built the pyramids have college degrees?

Because school focuses on conformity and thwarts creativity, it promotes individualism. In class, the grades proclaim one student better than the other, for there's always only one correct answer. In real life, however, there can be several correct ways of carrying out a task, as well as several wrong ones.

Throughout life, a student moulded in a classroom tends to focus on doing better than the other, and quite often, at the other's expense.

School teaches people to become employees, to become what they study. The problem with this is that many spend the rest of their lives minding someone else's business and making that person rich, instead of minding their own business and creating jobs.

Mr Ouma, a Nation journalist, is the author of Jot It Down.