It's time we asked whether boarding schools are truly necessary for the vast majority of Kenya's children. A school in Kiambu county is grappling with the horrific fact that some of the children under its care conspired to set on fire school property killing three schoolmates. Six girls from a sister school had earlier on left school without authority and were missing for a week before they showed up at a television studio of leading media company with a cockamamie explanation that raises serious doubts about the education children receive these days.
In colonial Kenya, very few Kenyans attended boarding schools which were almost always exclusively for secondary education. Indeed, very few Kenyans attended secondary schools at all. The reasons were many, but the principal one was that the few secondary schools available were reserved for the best and the brightest which was a precious small number. It is how Alliance, Mang'u, Lenana and Kenya High could provide such excellent facilities and why their alumni are the who's who of Kenya.
Another reason was that the cost of providing a secondary education at these schools was heavily subsidised, either by the colonial government or the church, mainly the Catholic church or the Anglican church. That remains true today only for the "national" schools, which are legacy schools from the colonial era.
One of the outcomes of expanding the number of residential schools throughout the country has been an explosion in the total number of inmates of these institutions. The number is unmanageable. The attention of detail that is achieved by Alliance and Mang'u is nowhere to be seen in institutions such as the troubled Stephjoy Boys' High School in Kiambu, where three students lost their lives yesterday. The quality of the faculty at Kenya High and Kianda is substantially lower at Stephjoy Girls' High School and its ilk. The Ministry of Education, captured as it is by special interests interested in tenders and political power, has lost its touch when it comes to the administration of the education sector. In the short to medium term, student unrest is not going to abate.
Every year since the death of a student at Upper Hill High School in Nairobi in 2008, there have been reported the deaths of students in residential secondary schools. Each time after a tragedy key stakeholders have pledge to address the matter. One of the most asinine decisions was to "ban" mock exams in 2001. Guess what? Mock exams are still being administered without the authority of the Ministry and the anxiety, stress and violence that accompanies the mock exams remains unaddressed.
The economics of a residential school system no longer make sense. By the end of the 1990s it was apparent that the cost of offering both a quality education and a reasonable standard of living in a residential school was beyond the means of many parents, yet the population of boarders has steadily risen. I believe it is time Kenya had an honest discussion with itself about the value of residential schools in the twenty-first century.
Some of the challenges of boarding schools can only be solved by shutting them down, death being the most obvious. In recent years drugs, "devil" worship and homosexual scares have become more prevalent. These can't be solved by cramming a thousand children in a poor-designed, poorly managed institution and cared for by poorly trained and unmotivated teachers and other staff. Parents have to become parents again. The crisis in boarding schools will not be solved by ignoring the realities on the ground. I believe that it is time to convert boarding schools into day schools, and reserve boarding schools for those with the hundreds of thousands per year that they can afford to pay for a quality education and assure the safety of their children.
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