By Wandia Njoya
At first I was resisted the idea of digitizing education because I was thinking of how many children will be thrown under the bus. But this morning, I thought: wacha iendelee. It will collapse this capitalist education system, which is a good thing.
You see, e-learning works only if learners are mature and already have a good grasp of content. The education system was already not providing good content. It was a suffocating and very narrow system, allergic to broad knowledge and very abusive. Then came CBC which openly claimed to be anti-knowledge, to which Kenyans stupidly cheered.
And then, the neoliberals who came up with this idea of e-learning were actually making a business decision. They wanted to use the world prestige of Ivy League in the US and Oxbridge in the UK to create a global education monopoly for the US and the UK. The idea was that since not everybody can fit in Harvard, then Harvard can come to you via the internet.
So those people pontificating and shooting off the top of their mouths that digital learning is about tech and development have no idea. It was always about business. The West laid the foundation stone for this mess in the 1980s with GATS, at around the same time they started destroying African universities because they said we only need primary schools.
Our education system was already kaput by the time this e-learning came along. It was teaching abstractions so that people get certification. The abstraction was designed to dehumanize us so much, that we become the stupid compliant citizens that you see in the upper deck people, aka miduklas. E-learning is the final nail in the coffin.
Because with e-learning, there is no teachers’ whip, no boarding school, to enforce what was already a bad education system. Eventually, local communities will spontaneously meet to learn together at forums outside the four walled, government-approved school. Others will discover that there’s no need torturing yourself with UoN e-learning when you can learn at the Harvard or Cambridge one.
Wacha tu. Kenyan universities don’t know what they signed up for. Me, I’ll be getting my friends together and we start an institute and teach a living syllabus, not these dead syllabi that are approved by the Commission. And sipping Mordecai Ogada’s masala tea will be a standard feature.
Meanwhile Lempaa Soyinka adds:
Education CS Magoha is currently killing secondary school education in Kenya by insisting on a 100% transition from primary to secondary without building extra classes or employing more teachers!
To sum up his liability status in Kenya as therefore a burden to Kenyans, Magoha says that children in Kenya are receiving online education after schools were closed because of covid -19.
The good old professor does not tell us how many parents in Nairagie Enkare or Morijo Loita or Mogotio or Kitui have access to internet or even smart phones .
Magoha has lost touch with reality. Maybe it is because of the very many days he has been on government payroll coupled with material woolliness that he has been enjoying in the last 20 years , as a VC, Chairman Knec and now a CS.