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The Minister for Education this week started conducting the annual spot of releasing the results of examinations and the predictable usual fanfare followed. The leading students were feted by their parents and relatives in the expected song and dance.

The next set of results will be released in quick order to the same reception. But if this sounds normal, it hides the uncertainty and turmoil in the education sector. What exactly is going on is not clear and when the entire system will settle down remains up in the air.

Class six, or is it now grade six, went through their assessment. But what next is still being debated. It is understood that these learners will remain at their current schools for another two years. But what follows is not entirely clear. Who is going to teach them? Teach them what? How? 

Kenyans believe in education as an equalizer, and it is probably the last frontier they will want to surrender to the government. It does not help that the government does not have the transition between the old and the new order entirely worked out.

Education, for many, remains the sure way of escaping a humdrum hustling life. It is for this reason that parents are often willing to offer whatever it costs to ensure that their children access good education.

Parents with means offer their children the best options. The tragedy in Kenya is that leading individuals in the education policy sector have little faith in the system and their children are secured in the more established and well provided for private schools and international curriculum. In the meantime, they struggle to watch the local one unfurl in wild ways.

The first daughter of the president recently featured in media platforms for her remarks regarding her exploits as a student at a local university. What the conversation failed to appreciate is the faith of the president in locally offered, homegrown education solutions. A man of means he could have sent his daughter anywhere in the world, but he chose the dry plains of Lukenya hills.  

Majority of parents do not have options. Public education is their only passport to a better tomorrow and for that reason government needs to move with speed to ensure that there is stability in the sector and that this turmoil, and yoyoing never happens again.

The new administration set up a team to provide guidance on the way forward. But we are looking for a way forward for a train that already left the station. The Competency Based Curriculum had already been rolled out in much of the lower education structure.

High schools have been drawing funds from parents to put up facilities in readiness for these graduates of CBC to join high schools. But these graduates, all preteens, would have been ill placed to leave home to start life in boarding schools. Now if they are to spend two more years in primary schools, obviously a better idea, then what to do with the investment already made in high schools.

Two years is not a long time, the class six will soon be ready for high school. That is still a wilderness as the Kenyan education conversation has not reached that level yet. There is the readiness of the facilities, the curriculum, the teachers yet to be thought through. 

Then after that there is the university education. Again, no conversation is taking place at that level. When these hapless children arrive at the university, what curriculum will they encounter? How are the universities preparing for this transition?

We risk losing an entire generation to an experiment that the country seems to have no control how it is going to turn out. This has huge implications on the future workforce and development of the nation. If one sector needs the full attention of the government then that sector is education. In this transition in the sector, international agencies can’t be allowed to have the dominant hand. It is the future of the soul of the nation, and as the saying goes, it is the wearer of the shoe that knows where it pinches.

— The writer is the Dean, School of Communication, Daystar University