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In 2022, Basic Education Principal Secretary Dr Belio Kipsang expressed the need for parents to reconsider the moral basis of the boarding school model for primary school pupils.

He disclosed that Kenya had the highest percentage of its children globally in boarding schools, at 28 percent against the world average that doesn’t exceed 15 percent.

Kipsang simply echoed the recommendations of the Presidential Working Party on Education Reforms that the day school system become the norm in the educational system, particularly at junior school level.

At about the time the PS made the remarks, I remembered talking with a young man who had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 2006. The man told me he had attended a boarding school in the Rift Valley in the early 1990s.

“I walked out of the school compound on the third day of admission, unhappy with my abandonment by my parents. I was picked up five kilometres away from the school,” the man, now a communication specialist, told me.

It was only last September that a senior civil servant told us, when the discussion on the boarding school system came up, that a lady colleague had faced her mother, then in her 80s, down with a terminal ailment, with a startling question.

“Mum, why did you hate me that much?” she asked her.

“How?” the mother asked, surprised.

“Do you remember taking me to boarding school in Standard Five?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you do it if you loved me?” the daughter asked.

These two episodes illustrate, more than any academic argument, how children view the boarding school system, if you were to ask them.

The boarding school system has certain advantages. The most unquestionable one is academic excellence. Students have the potential to excel academically. For working parents, boarding school settles their concerns about care of the children when they are away on duty.

However, parents don’t see the downside of boarding school at the preadolescent level for their children. Unlike a home, a boarding school is a relatively closed management model. It also means early separation from one’s biological or foster parents. The result: weakening of the parent–child relationship, and with it, children lack effective emotional support from parents in their growth and development.

Boarding school in the early stages integrates the personal lives of students with their academic lives. Unfortunately, it’s the academic life that predominates throughout, from the time children wake up until they go to sleep in the evening. This is unquestionably detrimental to the personal lives of the children.

The role of the family environment is more important for socialisation in the earliest stages of a child’s development than any other institution. Children are free to be themselves. To cry. To play. To play hide-and-seek games, and to fool around with their parents. There are times when parents can decide to be silly and fool around with their children. Those with a musical bent, they can sing and dance with the children. There is no exciting experience for children better than this.

However busy parents might be, there is what American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow called the Children’s Hour in his poem of the same title.

He says: “Between the dark and the daylight, / When the night is beginning to lower, /Comes a pause in the day’s occupations, /That is known as the Children’s Hour.”

This is the hour parents fool around with their children. when the day’s work is over. For you cannot live by work alone.

A school’s state-of-the-art infrastructure, and sporting gear cannot replace this. Nor can excellent academic foundations of the boarding school fulfil the elemental hunger children have — hunger that only a mother and a father and blood relations around them can quench. By simply having pep talks with them. By the mere physical presence of the parents around them.

— The writer is a Communication Specialist ; [email protected]