Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Homeschooling should be discouraged

Thomas Mundia, writing in The Standard on October 22, 2012, extolls the virtues of homeschooling (Homeschooling is viable, alternative form of education). He argues that homeschooling has these benefits: (1) Flexible learning schedules that compliment family life; (2) Education that is wholesome and tailor made for each child’s learning style; (3) Less peer pressure; (4) Close Parent-child relationship; and (5) Good Socialisation. These are benefits that we cannot challenge. They reflect the realities of today. Basic education continues to be underfunded on a colossal scale. The quality of basic education has been degraded to such an extent that more and more parents are taking to the private sector for the education of their young. Incidences of public sector strikes have interrupted the education of children at crucial stages. Despite this, it would be a mistake to encourage the growth of the homeschooling movement.

Mr Mundia is right that parents must direct the education of their children, but he is wrong when he insists that this right includes the right to remove their children from the formal institutions of the state and the private sector. Education serves more than to ensure that the youth have the basic skills to navigate a challenging environment. It cannot be reduced to ensuring that children have the necessary qualifications for employment alone. Education is more than the sum of the certificates that a person may accumulate in a lifetime of learning. It is the promise that a generation makes to another that life is a shared endeavour in which the energies and faculties of everyone are necessary for the survival of the community. In Mr Mundia's version of education, homeschooling will reinforce the worst instincts in Kenyans, including negative ethnicity, religious fundamentalism, nepotism, clanism or selfishness.

What Mr Mundia and the likes of the leaders of various parents'-teachers association and civil society should encourage is raising the level of government investment in the education of our children, especially public education. One of William Ruto's goals while he was the Minister for Higher Education, Science and Technology was to align higher education with the needs of the market economy. He had hoped to establish a system that would increase the level of investment in public universities with the aim of ensuring that with the increasing numbers of youth being admitted to these institutions, there would not be a corresponding decline in the quality of  higher education and that university graduates would compete effectively with the best of the best continentally and globally. When our children are educated together they are inculcated with common values and are infused with common goals. It is easier to demonstrate to them that children from different communities are not enemies to be distrusted or challenged, but that at the most basic level each has value and that the value is enhanced when it is put to the common good of the community. Homeschooling runs the risk of ensuring that in addition to the various social problems currently assailing our communities, the sense of unity that only children can demonstrate is slowly being whittled away.

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