Albert Einstein said education is what remains after forgetting what is learnt in school. Forgetting the school stuff here means benefiting from the sum of what was learnt in school. The impact of one sitting in class, interacting with teachers and fellow students, struggling with various school subjects, and calculating many sums.
So, the back-and-forth with the teachers and the continuous reading should make a person educated.Better persons are easier to work with. They obey laws, give their best in their professions and trades, don’t litter, wait for turn to debate, obey traffic lights, and are the custodians of society that holds people of different ages and understanding.
Because the World Health Organisation has warned that coronavirus and its effects will linger, it is upon individuals to master how to live with the pandemic that has brought the world economy to its knees.
Hear Kenya’s Health minister Mutahi Kagwe: “If we are disciplined, Kenya will not have mass Covid-19 deaths.”
Makau Mutua, a Kenyan law don, has also warned on Twitter: “I hate to bear TERRIBLE news. But Kenya is going to have a MAMMOTH explosion of Covid-19. Unless the State — and citizens– drastically ALTER their conduct.”
Two appropriate views that are also timely because Kenya, a poor country that is also struggling with corruption and erosion of values, has reported more than 10,000 Covid-19 infections since the first case was reported mid-March.
One of the constituencies that should be helping society to understand the depth, the pain, and the care around the disease are the educated people, certificate of training notwithstanding. There are fears that people are not adhering to the safety precautions, namely keeping a safe social distance, wearing the right mask the right way, washing hands with soap and sanitising hands using the appropriate solution of the right alcohol content.
Going back to Einstein, it is upon the educated to warn the rank and file that the warnings could come to pass if people continue “behaving normally,” as Mr Kagwe has warned a number of times.
When one educated person gets the protocol right, the world is many times safer than if professors, degree holders, diploma people and certificate holders threw caution to the wind.
It is education that will guide every individual to keep distance while shopping, in the streets, and while on a bus or a plane, now that Kenya has “reopened” its economy after a lockdown that has run for more than three months, confining people to their homes under a tight dusk-to-dawn curfew.
Once the educated who have the ability to project the likely impact, like Prof Mutua talks of “a mammoth explosion”, it will be easier for the rest to copy the good example of controlling the spread since no vaccine has been rolled out.
This is the time for professionals and their lobbies to run campaigns within their channels of communication and reaching out to the public through mass media notices.
While many lobbies and companies have resorted to branding face masks with their logos and other promotional literature, there is a need to go deeper and ensure that colleagues and fellow experts do the right things in keeping the disease at bay.
If the spread will be controlled, the input of the schooled is critical by simply resolving to do things the right way. Doing things the right way is the inimitable A-plain performance without restricting excellence to technical aspects of journalism, medicine, statistics, pharmacy and the like.
Professionals ought to borrow practice tenets and standards and use them in addressing pandemics.Being in the forefront by doing things the right way is the best form of discipline. And professional practice is only possible when and where people are healthy and secure.
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