Should Boarding Schools be Banned Following Unrest in our Schools
Over the past few weeks, there have been countless incidents of arson in our high schools. Some of the cases have ended in tragedy, with students losing their lives after their fellow students set the dormitories on fire.
It is a bit sad because the first case that set the chain of events that led to several schools being closed due to a fire outbreak was at my former high school. Yep, I am sure you are wondering how, since the first case was at Utumishi Girls, and I am a man. Well, I didn’t go to a girls’ school definitely. I went to the boys’ part of it, Utumishi Boys. However, when I was in school over a decade ago, the girls’ part that recently made the news was not yet built. They were still talking about building it.
When the girls’ school was ablaze, on fire, and several students lost their lives, I was a bit saddened because the current principal of the girls’ school used to teach us biology. She liked calling my name a lot in class. My grades in her class were terrible, but she was very encouraging. She would constantly complain that I am lazy. I don’t know why she liked asking me personal things in class and telling me to answer all the questions. I was quite slow back then. I eventually managed a C in biology.
So these fire outbreaks in our schools have caused some outrage with people calling for the closing down of boarding schools. “Raise your kids, don’t throw them to boarding schools for other people to raise them” is the sentiment.
I have been in boarding schools my entire life. I went to a boarding school at the tender age of 11 years, and it was quite shocking at first. The culture shock was real. I had been curious about joining one till I joined one. It was not so glamorous.
My elder sister and younger brother even went earlier than I, at 10 years old, I suppose. I know guys in America or Europe would look at that like child abuse. Why take a kid away from home at such an age? Well, in the spartan time, boys would go to the mandatory agoge at the age of 7 years. I also used to know a chic who went to boarding school at class 3, that is like 9 years old. Quite tender.
The best schools in Kenya are still boarding schools. A bright kid from a remote part of the country, like Turkana, Ngomeni, or West Pokot or Kilgoris, will have a good shot at joining a university by attending a good national school. Look at a majority of our politicians or prominent lawyers; these are men born in abject poverty who made it in life because they were bright and had a chance to attend major schools. Had they remained in their local village schools, they would not have amounted to much.
So boarding schools still have better facilities than day schools. The teachers are well-trained, and the schools are just better funded than day schools. You can’t compare the type of facilities at Kapsabet High Schools or Maseno School, or Alliance to those in extra-county schools. It is incomparable.
Good teachers are in those prominent national schools. However, with AI, I guess you can easily teach yourself a lot of things nowadays. With the amount of content online, you can easily find answers to most problems. ChatGPT can solve chemical equations and even some mathematical problems. It can answer almost any biology question instantly, so I don’t think our kids, unless they are lazy, are going to have problems with revisions.
What does the diet look like in some of our boarding schools?
The diet in some of our national schools is also just surreal. When I tell my friends who went to county schools that we used to eat pilau, nyama choma, chicken, fish, and pumpkins at my high school, they are shocked. The kind of diet they used to take in their schools is just unappealing. One of my friends was in a district school where they would eat githeri almost every day. And the funny thing is that he got better grades than me and became a computer scientist. I am only better than him in writing.
So, boarding schools shouldn’t be banned or even burned down by students. However, the hooliganism by the students and single-handedness by the administrations should be checked because the confinement is what lead to these unrests. Students like being free. The mind wants to be free.
As long as students don’t abuse their freedom and start doing funny things, they shouldn’t be restricted so much.
The security guard at my apartment used to be a guard at a private school a while back, and he raised a point that the small private schools or even the international schools and Group of Schools calibre schools have never had incidents of strikes or arsons like our public boarding schools because there is a conducive environment for learning in such schools. Even the primary boarding schools don’t strike, the problem is mostly in our high schools.
My friends who went to international schools tell me the vibe was totally different. First of all, some of those schools don’t even have a bell, so you just observe time by yourself. You will rarely find students late for class despite the school not having a bell. And every weekend, you can go home to say hello to your parents or hang out with your friends and come back to school. There is also no canning and such kind of things.
Public schools psychologically ‘manage’ students instead of raising them. Programmes are not bad, but programming students like prisoners who will escape at any chance of freedom is usually not the best way to raise them. People want to be ‘seen’ not ‘managed’.
If there will be good day schools in the future, I would take my kids there despite having gone to a boarding school myself. Developed countries with better education systems than ours don’t take kids to boarding schools. They still produce better professionals than us.
Kenyan boarding schools work well for some kids but destroy others. I would see kids come to school very innocent and naïve and focused on their studies, but with time, they get pulled in by peer pressure and adopt some weird habits. Kids who were straight become gay. Kids who were bright end up in some bad social circles and don’t get good grades, start doing drugs and drinking, and having sex at a tender age.
A 15-year-old boy has no business drinking or smoking and doing Molly, but it happens when they join boarding schools and want to look cool. They are also away from the watching eyes of parents, so they are likely to pick up destructive habits.
I remember when we were in a primary boarding school, not even high school, primary level. We were just around 13 years of age, a couple of classmates of mine skived out of school and went to a nearby village to have sex with the locals.
When they came back to school, they got suspended for a few weeks. Other crazy things were happening at that school that I don’t want to go into; I might make you scared. However, we studied like crazy in that primary school. I have never been through such a rigorous school system. Even my high school, despite being military-sponsored, was not as rigorous as my primary.
We were at the primary level, but at 8 pm, there was a teacher in class, and at 5 am, we were being taught mathematics. If people were sleepy in class, the teacher, Mr Rock Mambo, would tell us to go make laps on the pitch to wake us up. We were in class 7, Monica, so when he said at 5 in the morning, “Monica, wake up”, it meant doing rounds in the field.
The same teachers would be teaching during game time. When schools close at the end of the term, the senior guys, class 7 and 8, we would remain back for 2 weeks extra tuition. Trust me, those two weeks were so much fun. And we still had an extra exam during those two weeks tuition period. It is from that system that I managed to get into a good high school. And you wonder why I am so bright.
Therefore, boarding school works in some cases for certain students, but for others it doesn’t. I naturally adapt very fast to a new environment. Put me in a new environment, and in two months, I am locked in. I am very adaptable, like most men. Adaptability is our strength as men, but it can also be a weakness at times. You might get used to a bad situation.
The bad way of looking at boarding schools is to see them as institutions for shaping poorly disciplined kids at home. A parent is tired of a stubborn kid in the house and they kick them out of the house to a boarding school. That might not work well; they may become worse.
Boarding schools are thus not correctional facilities for poorly raised kids.
So, if you are a lazy parent who doesn’t want to raise their kid and throw them to a boarding school, thinking it will shape them, you are in for a rude awakening.
Boarding schools don’t always shape kids. A few do shape them, but a majority of them let kids figure out things by themselves the hard way.
Raise your kids yourself and tell them about the world, and don’t throw them into a new environment without some guidance.
When I joined a primary boarding school, and I realized kids were gay at such a young age of 11, 12, and 13, I was shocked to the core. I didn’t even know what gay meant at that age. I was from the village so that was quite foreign to me. When we closed school, and I asked my parents about it, they told me it was a sin, and I shouldn’t engage in it. Now thinking back, they failed in telling me early on about something like that before taking me to a boarding school.
I could have been an easy target for some guy who wants easy prey. A naïve, shy 11-year-old boy from the village won’t think much about another older male kid befriending them. Anyway, I never became gay because of boarding schools. Made tons of friends and learnt a lot.
Will you be a survivor if you go to a difficult boarding school?
Yes, you will be toughened a bit. The kinds of hardships at my primary boarding school made me very tough as a guy. I don’t like blowing my trumpet but I can be a tough cookie. When I joined high school, and I would hear my classmates complain about certain petty things, I never related to that level of softness.
I was too rough around the edges; I had to learn how to be sensitive again. Some of my classmates in high school had been to boarding schools where the laundry, dormitories, and even classes would be cleaned by other people.
That was not the case in my primary school; we would even wash our pit latrines by ourselves. Not washrooms, we were using pit latrines at my primary school, so the cleaning had to be done by ourselves. Those pit latrines were smelling so bad you couldn’t go in with your shirt, you had to remove your shirt because you would be smelling shit if you go in with your shirt or sweater.
The amount of resilience in someone who went to the kind of boarding schools I went to is just insane. Survivor Africa has nothing on the amount of hardships in some primary boarding schools. Even the kind of diet we endured in primary school is just nasty.
Monday was a cube of ugali and vegetables cut with a machete, both lunch and dinner. Morning was white porridge made of maize flour. Tuesday was the same porridge in the morning, githeri at lunch, and ugali and a piece of meat at dinner. Wednesday was the same uji ya white in the morning, ugali and beans at lunch, and I think ugali and vegetables at dinner. Thursday was tea in the morning and 4 slices of bread, githeri at lunch, and I think ugali and vegetables at dinner. Friday and Saturday were similar diet, white porridge, githeri at lunch, ugali and vegetable at lunch. Sunday was uji in the morning, rice and beans at lunch, and ugali and beans for dinner.
They tried to modify it at some point and gave us black tea at 11 am, just that, strong tea made of water, tea leaves, and sugar, with no escort. The canteen was selling only mandazis, and we were banned from carrying foodstuffs from home. The pocket money was kept at the account’s clerk office, and he would only give us Shillings 20 or 50 at most on Friday. That is less than half a dollar. What a difficult life. My parents were hard-headed. Whenever they visited, they would bring me some juice or chapatis or mandazis, so I always had some snacks.
That was the life back then, my high school diet of nyama choma and chicken was thus an upgrade, but trust me, I enjoyed primary school more and even had better grades than at any level of my education. My transcript for primary is excellent…some of my neigbhors were in high school with me, and whenever we hangout they tell me how it is difficult for them. It turns out these were guys who went to expensive private academies where they would eat bacon and eggs for breakfast. I never complained about food in high school because it was a cakewalk compared to the kind of life I lived in primary.
In primary we also got punished a lot. Severely punished many times, there is no pain in us. Chalk it up to growing pains. Most of my friends from primary school didn’t survive in many high schools; they were so strong headed they got kicked out of high schools because they were unruly. That brutality we went through turned us into animals.
I remember when I was in high school, guys from our class also got kicked out of school for wanting to burn the kitchen store. So, this desire to burn things in high school has always been there. One of my former neighbors, who currently lives in Canada, was among those who got expelled for planning the incident.
It is a bit psychopathic to want to burn things. One of my course mates from college told me he likes seeing something burn. He said it in passing when we were just having a casual talk and looking at a piece of trash burning. That hommie was sociopathic in many ways, from what I learnt later.
Pour Conclure
So, should we ban boarding schools because they destroyed guys like me? Not yet, but they need to be controlled with proper policies to ensure standards are there. They tend to be overpopulated at times.
Some of these schools are so big and have so few teachers that the administration has sort of lost control of the student body. They are unable to stop bad incidents such as strikes before they occur. Either way, don’t burn or ban them yet. Give them just a bit of control, and also equip day schools with good facilities so that parents don’t have to seek out boarding schools for kids.
Break a leg!
Slade.
