Praying for Trump. Source: BBC.
In my public engagements on CBC, I was constantly surprised that the arguments promoting the new education system were fundamentally racist and socially hierarchical. Some of the justifications of CBC which were unmistakably colonial were:
- We must reform education in line with what employers want, which was similar to colonial times when schools were for training Africans who would work in the colonial government
- Academic learning is beyond the “talent” of many Kenyans, which aligns with the view of imperial administrators like Lord Lugard that literary education ruins the African mind.
- Technical learning is more suitable for most Kenyans, a proposition which colonialists justified with claims that the African brain stops growing at teenage and could therefore not grasp complex ideas.
- Kenyan children are doing badly in the education system because Kenyan adults do not subscribe to nuclear family values. This rhetoric was similar to the racist attitudes of the 1970s of black American families and absentee fathers, and colonial attitudes about African families.
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