We reiterate that Competency Based Curriculumis a neocolonial education fashioned to dampen down the Kenyan populace so that the elites and western world can continue to rule us with wanton abandon.
Dr. Caroline Mose, a lecturer at a local university has reaffirmed this with a Twitter Thread, I share below:
I said this last week, let me repeat. My child is now in Grade 4. They were given a simple “entry exam” to test where they are in terms of what they learnt in Grade 3, comparative to what Class 4s did in Class 3 before CBC came in. There was a variance of 70%.
In other words, in the whole of Grade 3, with its dramas, market cleaning and project shenanigans, children lost up to 70% of numeracy and reading skill. They couldn’t even tell time on a simple clock which had roman numerals, because they couldn’t recognize these numbers.
‘CBC is not the education that the children of Kenya deserve’, Dr. Wandia Njoya
Yes, 844, in our imaginaries, pumped us and our older children with a lot of what might appear to be useless information. But a variance of 70% in terms of skills – which CBC is calling competencies, needs to give us pause. It is one thing to overhaul a system – but to make children lose out on up to 70% of competency in knowing and applying numbers and in reading – this should ring serious alarm bells. Even reading simple English and Kiswahili is a problem! In 844, Grade 4s (9/10 years) could read Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew/and the like. In CBC, the recommended reading material is so basic, it is for tears, for children who should be 3/4 years old, just settling into simple stories. As a Class Rep at my school, I was involved in an end-term project where we chose to buy books for Grade 3s going to Grade 4. We bought books which the children COULD NOT read – with concerns ranging from “the book is too big” (at 50-60 pages with illustrations), to “this book has been written for age 13). Can you imagine a 50 page book with large font and illustrations being touted as a book for age 13!!
Other children age 13 in other countries are doing complex math, learning how to code, learning how to use graphics, writing books and poems – here, they are being confined to books of 50 pages of large font and pictorials. Are we not deliberately dumbing down our children!!
We need to wake up. CBC, on paper, has its good points. But the way it is being implemented, the exclusivity of downloading and printing things in colour which only disenfranchises the poor, the dumbed-down reading material, the suspicious content from publishers, all that is cause for alarm. The portfolios, the files, the printing paper and foolscaps, the excessive material, the expensive books, the excessive costs and impractical projects – in the next 5 years, we will have many semi-literate youth in this country, unable to read and digest even the simplest of ideas, unable to grapple with complex ideas, unable to create any content, unable to think, read, compute. In 10 years, we will have youth perambulating across the landscapes of Kenya with zero education. Only the elites who can afford GCSE will have a semblance of coherence to do any work – GCSE and other alternative systems, which CBC is saying it is following, but is not. And we will have severe class differences in this country in another 15 years, when we are getting older, sicker, and there are no doctors etc.
Look at this big-picture, and it starts to get very scary. Who will be the doctors, teachers, thinkers, accountants of tomorrow if this is how we are delivering formative education? We need to wake up and organize.
