Education is a marathon, not a sprint

I remember with nostalgic feeling the day my mother held my hand one morning and took me to a nearby school in our village and left me there. I cried my heart out and wanted to ran back home. What I didn’t know then is that, it was the beginning of a long journey in my life.

When children start to walk they fall several times, and when they succeed, it is a major milestone in their lives. Success doesn’t come easily. In their falls, what matters is their resilience in trying again and again. In our learning journey, we can draw from this. My rural connection has given me an opportunity to widely visit many rural schools. There is a stark contrast between the learning conditions in rural and urban areas.

In most rural schools, infrastructure is dilapidated, classrooms are overcrowded, sanitation is poor, pupils sit on the floor, teaching materials are inadequate and the management is wanting. As a result, only a few pupils end up moving from primary to secondary and even to university. Just like in a marathon they make up lost years in other levels of schooling.

However, the picture that is always painted of the pupils who pass with high grade at each level is always fascinating indeed. And these attainments are always sufficient to get anyone into the job market. Because of the market demand, learning has always been a sprint that puts pressure on the learners.

Countries like the US, India and the United Kingdom realised this early enough and have adopted an education policy that enables those wanting to improve their knowledge to do so when they are ready and at the pace they want. They have abandoned the industrial conveyor belt model that we still embrace in favour of standardised high school equivalency exams offered at different times of the year.

This has made many to explore their full potential. Like many prominent people, Albert Einstein was not a bright student in high school. He dropped out of school at age 15. When he decided to continue with his education, he had to take the entrance exam to the prestigious Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

He failed and returned to high school to try for a second time the university entrance exam. He passed to join university where he went on to become famous for his theory of relativity.

Emerging technologies in the world, like artificial Intelligence, show that education is like a rose farm where pupils never blossom at the same time. Some will bloom early while, others will open up later but few will wither. In spite of all of these truisms, society never takes failure kindly. Failure is chastised. Some parents use abusive words on their children for poor results. In some cases, a significant number of pupils either commit suicide or develop mental illnesses.

In Kenya using exams as an indicator of success might not give the right picture. Some the pupils who score A in their early exams in most cases fail to measure up to the performance of their colleagues who barely moved on with C+ score or even those who scored a D and found other means to extricate themselves from the jaws of total failure to become very successful.

Who are these D pupils who become successful? Data from the past six years show that when children from rich family backgrounds score a D in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) exam, they enrol for the International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE).

This English language-based examination is recognised in the United Kingdom as being an equivalent to the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) used by many top universities in the world for admission.

More often than not, KCSE D pupils pass with A* in IGCSE. The pass rate to join university in the latter is over 95 percent compared to a paltry 20 percent who pass in KCSE. No study has been conducted to establish the performance disparity. Pupils who score below C+ and have no money for IGCSE simply will have to contend with the growing statistics of inequality in education.