Education secretary Fred Matiang’i inspects KCPE exam at a school last month: He has asked international schools to teach History and Kiswahili. PHOTO | FILE
What you need to know:
We need to apply ourselves more aggressively towards the preservation of the knowledge of our history.
Education secretary Fred Okengo Matiang’i has been on a roll over the past few months in this docket.
This week he issued a directive that all international schools domiciled in Kenya must teach Kiswahili and History, drawing strong opinions.
One needs to take time and understand the spirit of the directive to understand why it may be way past due and probably where technology can play a part in stabilising the future of a country with 42 tribes and an estimated 68 individual languages as mapped out by Ethnologue, a publication that curates statistics for 7,457 languages across the globe.
With the passage of time, those who bear the knowledge of how we came to be as a nation and the stories of our people, experienced only as one can by having lived in the time, are passing on and with them critical parts of us.
Official books and updated curriculum seem to sanitise and normalise narratives and we are slowly but surely churning out generations whose reasoning is solely anchored in current affairs soiled by negative ethnicity, corruption and a host of other ills.
While the curriculum process is controlled and guided, the interwebs are free and unencumbered avenues of expression.
We need to apply ourselves more aggressively towards the preservation of the knowledge of our history.
The idea of local content has never been this clear for me. Gaming is a big phenomenon and we can tap into the medium to deliver this education in a different way.
Digital natives are our future and we need content online that speaks to our thirst of knowledge that would for example help a young man, born and bred in Nairobi of parents from different ethnic communities currently dating from a different tribe to discover the richness in which he exists and seamlessly flow and interact with all three parts of him understating cultural nuances, history and ways of living.
There are books out there that carry some of these stories from our past, but we all know how out-of-stock those can be, notwithstanding the last time you walked into a bookstore versus the last time you were online.
There is beauty in our diversity and until we have a common foundation and understanding we will continue to have a false sense of patriotism and the current system of devolved government is not helping much in framing things.
Njihia is CEO of Symbiotic | www.mbuguanjihia.com | @mbuguanjihia
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