Mollis and our education.

My parents had great faith in the public school system once. Rabai Road Primary School gave me decent enough grades that my transition to the Machakos Boys' School was uneventful. The former was a day school; the latter was residential. When I attended both Kenya was just about to hit the nadir with the cost-sharing lunacy that had been part of the Bretton-Woods' structural adjustment programmes of the '80s and '90s. But despite this, I had a wholesome time and, though some may have a different take on it, I came out rather well-adjusted.

I have no doubt that it is much riskier to commit your child to a residential school in Kenya today. The "Mollis" trending topic on Twitter convinced me this to be true. Allow me to explain.

But I begin with another headline news story: 45 boys and girls, from different boys' and girls' boarding schools, on their way home from school for the August holidays, were detained by the police because they had converted the bus they were riding in into a den of licentious behaviour and debauched abandonment. These boys and girls are who become the dramatis personae a la "Mollis" and the unnamed woman in that audio file.

In the relatively good old days, public schools were not overwhelmed by inmates - sorry, students. When I attended the Machakos School, the facilities were strained but at no point did my class ever exceed forty students. I believe this is the reason that Mrs Mutie could keep an eye on whether I truly understood the conjugation of verbs and Mrs Olang could determine whether or not I was able to differentiate between isotherms and isobars on a topographical map of the lower Lambwe Valley.

Mr Muthengi's stern visage was a part of my maturing process; he understood that my adolescent hormones were likely to lead to much grief so he took a rather hands-on view of my whys and wherefores but not so hands-on that I wasn't able to romance Ms S, she of Precious Blood, or spend a brief second-base moment with Ms H, she of Mbooni Girls'. And though he will deny it till the cows com home, I believe Mr Muthengi and his colleagues knew that we were hot-blooded and determined to "get some" so they saw to it that sex-ed came to us in unconventional ways and that condoms were affordably available at the School Nurse's centre. In my four years there, I do not believe a schoolboy became a teenaged father nor got an itch that required massive doses of antibiotics and the stigma of being a careless swordsman.

These are not the good old days. Boarding schools more and more resemble lunatic asylums than institutions of learning. My classmates and I had alcohol - both manufactured and traditional -  cigarettes and the occasional weed. We had "funkies" - heavily chaperoned - at the aforementioned Precious Blood and Mbooni Girls', among others, where, somehow, we were introduced to the opposite sex, how to talk to them, how to dance with them (awkwardly, by the by), how to argue with them, how to cope with a broken heart, how to break hearts, and how to treat them with decency and respect. I believe mine was almost likely the last generation that took penmanship seriously and love-letter-writing to an art form.

Many boys and girls today are under a tremendous amount of pressure while at the same time feeling abandoned by their parents, teachers, preachers, friends, elder siblings, uncles and aunts. Many grandparents are dead or otherwise unavailable. You principle priority as a child in the twenty-first century is to "pass" your exams. That is, you must score an A at the KCPE and be called to the "right" national school at which place you will score another A at the KCSE and be called to the University of Nairobi, Moi University or, if your father can hack it, pass the entrance exam to Strathmore, and join its business school or its super-fancy law school. If you don't, no matter what everyone tells you, you feel like an absolute failure.

This pressure to pass exams has come at a high price. School schedules revolve around exam timetables. Many of the social skills that parents and schools are supposed to impart on these boys and girls are never imparted. Many of them now grow up knowing that sex is what is depicted on TV; that the consequences of drug abuse can be elided because their favourite movie or hip hop star has elided these consequences. Many of them are socialised by social media, a terrible echo chamber where one can hear only the views that reinforce their already distorted world view. Mollis and the woman in the audio file are the cautionary tale of the modern education infrastructure that insists on good grades, good schools and the right professional courses. The symptoms of this Mollis behaviour are the boys and girls who conspire to hire a bus so that they can use it as a drug-and-sex moving party palace. Or who set school property on fire, never mind if schoolmates are asleep inside or not.

The solutions, as always are easy to propose and mightily difficult to effect. Mwai Kibaki will forever be remembers for "free" primary education. Uhuru Kenyatta should have built on this. The tremendous numbers of children being brought into the education system required a massive expansion: in school facilities, in teaching personnel, in teacher training facilities and recruits. Instead, it is lunacies like laptops for babies and railways that hold sway. Second, it is time Kenyans discussed whether the current boarding schools' model is working. The events of the past decade are an indicator that is all but obsolete today. Perhaps it is time we considered day schools as the norm and boarding schools for those who can pay the true price for them. Finally, Kenya must stop being schizophrenic about sex and sexuality. Honest discussions about the thirteen year olds giving blowjobs to the fifteen year olds, or the sixteen year olds terminating pregnanies because they can't remember how many boys on the bus had their way with her must be had if we are to socialise our children better about male-female relationships, sex and consent.