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Definition: In Kenya, a card sent to wish a candidate success, usually one sitting final year primary or high school national examinations. Function: An annual ritual, carrying with it a fearful baggage of expectations. Also a tactic used by pimply-faced graduating youth to secure purely hormone-driven relationships beyond high school. NB: Latter function irrelevant to the present call for the boycott of an entrenched national tradition.
A brief lesson in linguistics, cut and pasted from Merriam-Webster on-line
Word: Success
Pronunciation: \sək-'ses\
Etymology: Latin successus from succedere
1 : Obsolete : OUTCOME, RESULT
2a : degree or measure of succeeding b : favorable or desired outcome; also : the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence
3 : one that succeeds
Boycott! Boycott! Boycott!
In about a month, Kenyan students will be going through that dreadful tension-packed period associated with the approach of final exams meant to graduate one from primary to high school or high school to college. They are standardized, sealed and delivered under tight security. Every candidate across the country gets to sit the exact same test in a given subject at the same time.
Around January, candidates awaiting their results can be seen walking about with that shifty-eyed restless syndrome, like one about to disappear into a squirrel hole. Please don't ask them questions pertaining to exams and results and success, just so you can watch them break into a cold sweat, suffer incoherent speech and rush bitter bile up the esophagus. It's such needless torture.
On the morning the Minister for Education officially announces the release of the results, a dreadful disquiet charged with nerve‑wracking anticipation falls upon the land, followed by rising ripples of chaos, castigation and cheers after each school receives their results, and then, a quiet foreboding in many homes whose thousand tons of hopes and dreams had been placed upon a failed candidate's young shoulders.
Here are some statistics: 66% of candidate who sat high school exams in the past 4 years attained a D grade and below, scores considered too low to qualify one to any college in Kenya. This was the damning report from the 2009 Secondary School Heads Association. Annually therefore, Kenya's examination system spits out an avalanche of "failures" to the streets, with no hope for the future, having been locked out by a system that considers a college education and white collar jobs as the only determinants of success in life. Their poor performance in academia is punished with scorn, stigma, or simply embarrassed acceptance of "our child the failure".
The small percentage of graduates who make it to college and obtain white-collar jobs are counted as a family's success stories. These successful few (as to whether they are happy and fulfilled in their careers is inconsequential to society) have not had any meaningful effect in shaping a better socio-economic order. Their success in life is overwhelmed by the annual avalanche of the jobless. The violent fall-out following the 2007 general elections stands as the latest evidence that the Kenyan society was terribly ill all along.
Just when we thought we were doing so much better, just when we were celebrating being a beacon of democracy in an African sea of chaos, just when we boastfully lay claim to genetically fathering the man who took charge of the world's superpower, everything came a‑tumbling down. What happened, you ask. I'll tell you: a "failure" generation happened; not overnight, but over time, generously produced through the academic examinations assembly line.
Idleness, restlessness and visionlessness have come to characterize this growing generation of failed youth. We have no programs to inspire the genius that the standardized exam system fails to test. Is it any wonder that in the past two decades Kenya's political thugs have managed to execute their macabre schemes using gangs of idle and disaffected youth. Every time political power play heats up, some youth outfit is easily constituted and deployed to fight, maim, kill and destroy.
A consistent build-up of youth scorned for being unintelligent, walking about with suppressed talents and untapped genius in arts and technology have brought us to where we are. The sheer numbers of young people below the age of 25 in Kenya, and all of Africa, should make us realize that some catastrophe of biblical proportions would befall us if the children and youth population is not of first, second and third consideration in all crafting of national policy. The older generation still holds the reigns of governance in the 21st century, using obsolete shut-up-and-listen techniques.
The real tragedy of the "failure" generation is not that they failed to achieve required academic grades for college entry; the tragedy is in society's collective acceptance that this failure should define the rest of their lives. Their choices for advancing are extremely limited. For the most part, they will hang their heads low in shame until some kind providence, like an uncle in Nairobi who needs a houseboy or an aunt abroad who can finance their way to hopefully greener pastures, comes to their rescue. We are a society that punishes failure and fails to nurture genius outside of rigid academia.
Artists, scientists, philosophers, explorers and political leaders who have shaped our world have all experienced failure and known that without it, they never could have made their great achievements. Sometimes, they too were scorned and ostracized; creative geniuses who oftentimes risked society's label of failure for failing to earn a decent living, scientists whose discoveries challenged falsehoods held as truths by established shut-up-and-listen authorities. We owe our youth the opportunity and freedom to innovate, create, and rise above mediocrity.
Our villages are full of fundis who failed to make it to college and settled to fixing this-and-that for a pittance. We saw them tinkering endlessly with broken appliances and scraps of junk as they grew up, told them to stop wasting time because their tinkering will not be tested in the final exams. They could have conquered the next frontier in technological innovation had their talent been recognized and given opportunity to grow.
Parents should stop going into panic attacks when their children exhibit creative talent that might lead them to build careers as actors, dancers, writers, musicians or visual artist. The most dangerous lie perpetuated by our academic system is that sciences are superior disciplines and the arts are for lesser intellects. The arts, language of the soul, are the great equalizers of fragmented human societies and the material from which a national conscience is created. Who needs this more than Kenya? Celebrate and grow your child's talent whatever it may be. It is a caning of the soul for a lot of young geniuses out their.
I'm calling for the boycott of the success card because it carries with it the caning of the soul for thousands who will not achieve a particular kind of prescribed success.
www.spotbeam.org
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