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A decade or two ago the premise existed that if you did well in primary school you went to high school, if you did well in high school, you went to university, if you did well there, you got a good a job, with a respectable salary and went about the rest of your life in a more or less progressive manner.
This of course no longer holds true. This year only 41, 879 of those that sat their KSCE exams last year, i.e. 2011, will be admitted to public universities. That means more than half of the 118, 256 students who qualified to join public universities will not be selected to join, due to lack of places. The number of students that will miss out on secondary school slots is even higher. This year the Ministry of Education estimated that approximately 205,000 pupils who sat for their KCPE exams in 2011 would miss a place at secondary school. Of course the option to go private exists but the cost of private education is prohibitive for most Kenyans.
Those that make it out the other end of the education system, and successfully graduate from university, do not always fair as well as expected in the “real world”. Not only is there a shortage of jobs for graduates to take up, the current system of education has been accused of producing graduates that are not fit for the work place. The heavy workload of the current system of public education has been said to reduce learning to cramming for a series of standardized tests while imparting very few skills necessary for the workplace. And these are not the only isssues, apart from the problems inherent to the system of education itself, the education sector seems to be in a state of crisis i.e. the misappropriation of funds for the provision of free primary education; frequent strikes by teachers over low wages and understaffing; accusations of unfair distribution of education bursaries…the lists seems endless.
However despite the problems with the education sector/system and that the fact that the benefits of education are no longer linear a good education remains a crucial element in breaking the cycle of poverty. A good education system is represents the largest investment that that government makes in human capital. Ideally education should work to develop a constituency that is knowledgeable in evaluating options based on available evidence and criteria i.e. the education should help us makes educated decisions, but does our current education system do that or is it broken? How would you the rate state of public education in Kenya, not just for quality or its transformative effect on the lives of individuals who receive it, but also for the effect of public education on the development of the country, and in the building, sustainable democracy - good, bad or average? And is the government playing an effective role in education reform?
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