Kenyan Schools

View of Lockwood from parking lot

Let me tell you about the secondary education experience in Kenya. I can’t even imagine an American kid surviving the demands of a Kenyan high school. So I’ll use Lockwood as a base case as it seems to take a relatively liberal approach. It also is an attractive and well maintained property with nice landscaping.

All of their belongings have to be inventoried by a matron before they enter the school

4 of our girls in front of Reception

Weekday schedule at Lockwood:
4 - 4:15 am wake up and prepare for the day
4:45 am begin study and go to class
6 - 6:30 am breakfast
6:30 - 11 am classes
11 - 11:20 am tea and buttered bread
11:20 am -12:30 pm class
12:30 to 1 pm lunch break
1 -2 pm classes again
2 - 2:20 pm tea
2:20 - 4 pm classes
6 - 6:30 supper
7-9 pm the equivalent of study hall.
Lights out is 9:30 pm.

The schedule, as you can see, offers little free time - by design. At Lockwood there are 8-9 classes per term. On Saturday they get a break. Classes are only from 8 am to 1 pm. Other schools may require 10-11 classes per term up to junior year when they may select classes and drop down to 8 or 9 per term.

After classes on Saturday, the girls are responsible for a general cleaning of the dorm, sweeping, mopping, cleaning the showers and toilets. They may also use this time to wash their clothes - by hand. Sunday afternoon they clean classrooms and may wash their clothes. Entertainment on Saturday evening may be TV, a movie, or music and dancing (girls only). Sunday morning there is study time and worship. Sunday afternoon is strictly organized as well. Sunday evening lights out is at 9 pm. There are no mixed sex socials.

The swimming pool

Two afternoons per week after class Lockwood offers sports. The school has a field  for field hockey as well as a soccer field and an olympic size swimming pool. They are looking for a swimming coach and hope to be able to hold competitions there. On two other afternoons per week the girls attend club meetings. Wildlife clubs are popular as is Girl Scouts. Excel school has clubs or sports on most weekdays, but they only have one sport field and no swimming pool. St. Tito has clubs (a club meeting may entail cleaning a classroom) or sports only two days per week and no entertainment at all and only rare club outings. And at St. Tito classes run from 5:30 am to 5 pm, dinner at 6 pm with 2 hours of enforced study hall after dinner.

Lockwood sounds like it has superior food to other schools I’ve heard about. They serve rice for most meals, but it is accompanied by meat some days and they have fresh vegetables from their shamba. At some meals during the week githeri is served. They also have a diary farm and so have plenty of milk for the twice daily British style tea (milk, a bit of tea, and very sweet). They even bake their own bread for the buttered bread served with the tea. On one weekend night they have chicken and on Wednesdays they serve chiapati - our girls grinned broadly when they heard about that!

Compared to other schools, this food sounds pretty good. I was told that at Excel, almost all meals consist of cooked cabbage and ugali with very occasional githeri, no meat. The girls do get milk in their tea for some protein. From what I’ve been told, other boarding schools serve an equally monotonous and nutritionally deficient diet.

Then there’s the matter of discipline - usually physical punishment. I will be interested to hear what the approach to discipline at Lockwood is. Kate pulled one girl out of Baraka school, which has an excellent academic reputation, because the child came home one weekend with bloody knees from having been made (along with her entire grade) to “walk” on their knees, to class, meals, everything for an whole day as punishment for some of the students talking in class. And this at a school where the area in between dorms, classrooms and dining halls is rough rocks set in hard packed clay soil. At Shiners, discipline is often caning (beating with a cane), in spite of the fact that that practice has officially been outlawed in Kenya.

A lot of what goes on in the schools is a reflection of the desperation parents and educators feel for the children to ‘get ahead’ and succeed. Jobs are in very short supply in Kenya and unemployment is high. Somehow they seem to think that physical punishment for misbehavior or for poor grades will make their children work harder and that cramming all these classes down their throats will mean they learn more. What I see is a lot of burn out and shutting down. Also, a lot of what passes for education here is ‘teaching to the test’ - rote memorization with little in the way of real understanding of the subject matter. Eighth graders and seniors have to take national exams. For 8th graders, their results on the exams will determine whether they can get into the best secondary schools. For seniors, their exam scores will dictate whether they will get one of the few spots in the public universities that are cheaper and better than the private colleges. Only about a third of the students whose scores qualify them actually secure a spot at a public university. As you might imagine, cheating and bribery is rampant as parents with more resources seek to insure their child gets one of the coveted university appointments.