After managing Starehe Boys Centre for more than 35 years, founder Geoffrey Griffin wrote a book on managing a boarding school, revealing that there are poor schools thanks to weak management. Years later, Jim Clifton of polling firm Gallup, said one of the things making the jobs war fiercer is the fact that many learners are “rotting” in bad schools and graduate without ability to create decent jobs.
Dr Griffin says in the second edition of his book School Mastery that “good schools are few but poor schools very numerous” even though “some may be fair academically, but their systems of managing pupils are inferior, often downright bad.”
Perhaps the late Griffin is helping in understanding what a good school is, explaining that it goes beyond passing exams. What a young person requires is good education to help him or her “to stand on his own feet in life,” he says in the book.
Standing on your own means staying safe and being in charge of your life, although it is open to many interpretations. It means having the ability to withstand bad influence, for example the vice of corruption that is sweeping the scene like a tornado.
In what the school named The Starehe Way, Dr Griffin said he was preparing boys to become men who are not distracted by the surrounding, who remain ramrod-straight irrespective of the external forces.
Indeed, many years ago, Einstein said “education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learnt in school”. That after the certificate, be it a diploma or a degree or many of them, how influenced is a person to give the community the right shape?
It means that a good school prepares a candidate for continuous creation until they breathe their last. That an educated person is married to the business of building the world. They are restrained and are bold to use technical knowledge in saving people who are drowning in various forms of storm: environmental degradation, joblessness, corruption, disease, limited knowledge, hunger — name it.
On July 27, 2019, the acting director of Starehe Boys Centre Josphat Mwaura said during the centre’s sixtieth anniversary fete that they are committed to graduating young men who can “maintain an independent mind and remain unadulterated by any corruption.”
Among other things, this means that school managers and teachers ought to work overtime in ensuring that the young ones, young minds, young brains, young souls, young bodies in their care are shown the right way to make the community better.
While young people have opinions and rights, it serves them right to be guided during their formative years to make them responsible people in their immediate surroundings and away from home, away from mum, and away from dad.
While students have to pass exams by the end of the day, they require the strength to use academic prowess in making their own lives better, reaching out to the neighbour and the globe to solve problems.
One of the problems keeping the world awake is getting good jobs and work of dignity. This can only be realised when schools do a good job of making learners whole.
