MISEDUCATION

I was lucky enough to have attended one of the worst, if not the worst public universities South of the Sahara and North of the Limpopo. But dont get me wrong, I am not complaining, well, maybe just a little, but if you are like me and attended a public university then we probably share in the same predicament and can attest to the dreadful situation our institutions of purported higher learning are in.

My idea of university, any ones idea of university really, is centers of excellence and high intellect, where brilliant minds get to share ideas, create new solutions to ever budding problems, group studies on lush green lawns as per brochures, and if you are lucky, breeding ground for future families. In the Kenyan context, what meets the eye is the complete opposite.

From lack of sufficient lecturers, what is a school without tutors?, to lack of lecture halls, students forced to study under the most callous of environments, forced to set up shop in corridors and in extreme cases in hired out tents. Whats even worse is the pathetic boarding facilities students are forced to contend with, bedbug ridden hostels with sanitary conditions wanting, missing results or no results all together among others. All these challenges and more yet students are still expected to put out their best in class, the non-existent classes that is. We had a running joke back in campus, we shall be half-baked graduates we said, and true to that word, the desired output of a university graduate was never achieved, we are indeed half baked graduates.

If you compare the state of public education vis a vis private and international institutions, you find a stark contradiction. By far graduates from private institutions are tenfold better off than their counterparts from public institutions. This becomes evident especially during the search for the limited job opportunities, where private and international university graduates are preferred due to their demonstrable efficiency from years of top tier education.

This however should not be the case, education is a public asset and investment in it should be of a level commensurate to the desired output quality education can achieve. Every year graduates produce research projects and thesis documentation on solutions to problems such as traffic but these reports are left to gather dust in store houses as no one acts upon them, yet we continue languishing in problems. It is therefore criminal for the state to allow public universities to become laughing stocks and churn out graduates with have no footing in the real world. Bringing out unlearned intellectuals.

It is as such paramount that the State Department in charge of education pull up its socks in dealing with the challenges universities face, because if nothing is done to avert the situation, hopelessness among the young people will only soar, and a restless youth is a dangerous youth.

A state that does not educate and train women is like a man who only trains his right arm