Education system must produce thinkers

Kenyans deserve a better education system, in a matter that goes far beyond the current curriculum reform. For the nation’s educators, from primary school to university, are generating a problem in our young employees, and our society, and it’s deep-seated.

It all begins with how human brains are wired to process information. We, all of us, are programmed to assess risk. Indeed, so inherent is this process of getting to the cause of an event to establish its consequences, that nearly every three-year-old that has begun life on our planet goes into a natural ‘why’ phase.

Why? But why? But why? Until we parents and carers have literally run out of any answers at all. Indeed, the temptation can be to revert to the oldest gem of all, the ‘because I said so’ closure.

And then that young mind gets to school. And from there educational philosophies shape whole cultures and societies.

So what happens when you put the young ‘why’ brain into an education system that finds student questions irritating, and actually inappropriate?

Suppose the system teaches children that leaves turn yellow when sick, and it goes on to explain why, but subliminally, the behaviour it demands is: “wait and I will explain: do not ask questions, do not think, just learn”?

What if that same approach is extended to high school, and then to university? What kind of problem solvers does it deliver?

Have they been challenged and stimulated, prompted and versed, in thinking their own way through to solutions?

For sure, it isn’t evident. I still remember recruiting one graduate who had earned a distinction from university, and seeing some of his essays. How did this earn a distinction? Where was the thinking, the analysis?

For learning facts doesn’t equip people for outstanding success in anything, not in cable laying, not in medical surgery, not in business, and not in life.

The fact is that not all things can be known, and none of us do know everything: not all situations and variants can be pre-learned, not all situations are generic or universal.

Things happen, challenges arise that require analysis to arrive at an understanding and solution, and when we stunt that analytical muscle in young people’s thinking, we curb their performance in every way.

Across we employers, drawing in the quietened ‘waiters’ - not serving people at table, but waiting to be told the answer - some try codifying everything: when this happens, do this.

But the impact on a business is stultifying. I notice it most in client meetings. People educated to stop asking questions aren’t asking questions even in their minds, so it affects what they hear. It means they don’t spot issues, don’t notice a gap between aims and methodology: they are literally just waiting for the instruction list.

And they are often silent.

I talk to other bosses. They moan about lack of engagement, or quality of work, they express frustration.

But maybe the answer from top to bottom is to stop training people to learn and start training them to think. It’s actually harder. And especially when brains have already developed with that function largely suppressed.

In fact, the way brains form, as they grow through childhood, and actually until around age 21 or 22, means that the way they are used has a circular and reinforcing affect on how they develop.

That makes muscles a perfect analogy: keep running, and the leg muscles get stronger. Keep questioning and the brain’s mechanics for asking questions gets stronger too.

So what do we need from the Kenyan education system to make ‘amazing’? Not facts learnt, but thinking and analysis, which is hard, and initially alien and daunting.

If it were regularised, implanted in every method, in every exercise, in group work, in materials, in books, in the classroom – then we would create outstanding thinkers for that distinction, those who can view a hypothesis, or an event, or an outcome from every angle: and make sense of it.

Youth, in short, equipped to find the answer themselves. And more than that: youth who because they ask why, also ask why not: and break all our boundaries, innovating.