by Pius Adesanmi
When I noticed that my sister, Wandia Njoya, was complaining persistently about the “unAfricanness” and the “unKenyaness” of the new basic education curriculum framework recently launched in Kenya, I decided to go take a look at the document.
Outdated European theories. Dead white men. But that is not even the most tragic part. Those who wrote the Kenyan document did not stop here. They even elevated the British Council to a philosopher of education. They quoted British Council documents so many times I was dizzy. Even their definition of critical thinking was supplied by the British Council!
No African thought or viewpoint in the document.
This from the country of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and decolonizing the mind!
But the Kenyans even tried. They tried to copy the British Council because they have never heard of conceptual philosophies of education in Africa. The Liberians recently decided that thinking through education curriculum themselves is too much trouble so they outsourced their basic education thingy to a predatory for-profit American company offering fast food American education curriculum. They basically invited that company to come and run their basic education. Like Wandia in the case of Kenya, some of my Liberian intellectual friends have been doing a lot of gnashing of teeth.
This means that my Kenyan and Liberian friends do not know how to smell impending economic opportunity for their countries.
When Kenya and Liberia have successfully turned their public education system to sites of third-rate, maladapted British and American curriculum, the moneyed Nigerian elite, who don’t even have any basic education system to speak of back home, and have consequently turned their children to refugees in the Ghanaian school system, will abandon Ghana and ship their children to Kenya and Liberia.
To Kenya and Liberia: if you are going to adopt inferior British and American education (Africans always bastardise and wrongly implement whatever they copy from the West), please do it well. Complete the picture by hiring lots of teachers with locally acquired British and American accents. A locally acquired British or American accent is crucial to attracting Nigerian customers.
Then watch the Nigerian elite flood your school systems with money they are currently storing in apartment rooms and cemeteries in Lagos and Abuja. You can at least make some good Nigerian money while inferiorizing your public education in Kenya and Liberia. Give Ghana some competition for Nigerian money!
Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija
Pius Adesanmi, a professor of English, is Director of the Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada
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