The years between childhood and adolescence are crucial to young people. At this time, they learn the skills and values that prepare them for adulthood.
Unfortunately, Covid-19 has disrupted learning globally, locking more than one billion learners out of schools, according to the UN.
Kenya, like every other nation, is having sleepless nights over securing learners during the Covid lockdown, a case that has thrust education stakeholders into a trial and error mode.
Reopening of schools is also a nightmare in Africa, especially the sub-Sahara, where the basics like running water, toilets and spacing in classrooms are difficult.
When and how learners can return to school is a challenge and none other than the World Health Organisation is now asking African countries to come up with safer ways of reopening schools.
Teenage pregnancies and weak nutrition, violence and exploitation are some of the woes WHO Africa director Dr Matshidiso Moeti has cited, warning that getting “blind-sided” by efforts to contain Covid-19 may leave the continent with “a lost generation”.
Unicef, the UN arm dealing with children welfare, went further through its Eastern and Southern Africa director, Mohamed M. Malick Fall, who said the impact of extending schools closure would hurt children’s future and communities.
These warnings have come at a time Kenya, which has pushed schools calendar to next January, is launching community-based learning.
The same schooling as an agent of transformation, uses reading and writing skills to bridge the gap between the values and skills on the one hand and their acquisition on the other.
Good character apart from conduct is, therefore, not just an important element of education, it is the penultimate aim of schooling.
Schooling should nurture students into citizens who understand their environments, big and small; at home, nationally, regionally and globally.
The pre-adult years are thus a special opportunity for society to give learners the instruments and ethics for useful growth and service.
Kenya’s community-based learning may not be a perfect solution to the challenges brought about by Covid-19, but it can fill the gap left due to schools closure in efforts to tame the spread of the disease.
It is right to take students back to school at a time there are fears the prolonged stay at home will introduce them to distractions like earning through menial jobs, hurting their climb to more a meaningful future.
Through community-based classes, unnecessary and aimless movements will be reduced, thereby securing the young people from trying and testing activities like sex at the wrong time.
Children who are bred on values and strict steps many times stay out of harm’s way as they struggle with stepping, hopping and jumping into the right environment where they can think freely at the right age.
Children require a society that cares and delivers them to the more complex duties of growing the world. If nothing else, the complexity of world problems and the search for solutions should force the society to secure children, giving them safety, security, and good education.
The young generation plays a crucial role in nation building. Their contributions could appear insignificant, but their destruction could spell doom for generations.
Lately, there is a worrying rise in the number of school girls getting pregnant and boys doing drugs with abandon. These, among others, may derail them from their dreams or compel them to join terror groups because they feel idle and hopeless. The parents, the educators, and the government must not wait until these reach a point of no return.
The schooling system, it emerges, is the major instrument in the shaping of the child, who is in school five days in a week and remain there for years. It is a preservation of sorts.
And none is discriminated against in school, especially in Kenya.
Charles
Merriam in “The Making of the Citizens” observes that the beauty of it all is
that the whole community is drawn into the great melting pot. For a very
important reason, schooling, whichever form it takes, will be significant in
creating the almost natural safe zones for children, especially the girls.
In
contrast to the other agencies that socialise the young generation such as the
family influence, peer, the church, print and electronic media, the school is
available in centralised and uniform control.
The
community-based learning need not be so academic in its delivery. It needs to
answer or seek new approaches of experiencing and interpreting what it means to
be educated. It may also want to address the immediate concerns of our times by
roping in the learners to regard values.
This
is also the moment when teachers can tap information technology to facilitate learning,
the myriad difficulties notwithstanding.
If well executed and guided with continuous consultations, the community-based learning can be a rescue plan for Kenya’s children.
Concerns and questions about content can be ignored for now. The idea is to remove the children from issues that are not educational in nature.
