The Vocation of Kenyan University Education
Vocational training is not the only thing necessary, and reducing education to mean vocational training alone is a fatal mistake that we must avoid.
Many people who pass through the Kenyan system of education seem to lack a desire to contemplate the truth. They seem to be ruled instead by an overwhelming concern for the practical and the useful. That the previous sentence has an almost condemnatory tone may come as a surprise. After all, what could be wrong with something being useful? Would it be better that we strive for what is useless – that we ignore our evident financial, health, housing, and other problems and spend our time chasing after things that seem to do nothing to alleviate our situation?
We would do well to remember, however, that this caustic rejoinder can be found on the lips of both destitute people and others who could be said to fall in the category of “bourgeois”. The system of education in many schools, in diverse areas of the country that have different standards of living, places a great deal of emphasis on grades and certificates as guarantees of “employability” or “marketability”, an emphasis which contains a subtle inversion of priorities.
By no means are Kenya’s universities exempted from this inversion. Unfortunately, much of the content of courses taught in Kenyan universities simply fails to keep abreast of new knowledge and developments. Many a lecturer still dictates notes or reads off slides containing the information that was “conveyed” to him decades ago in his university years. This lack of concern for reality, to put it in rather general terms, may be born of laziness, short-sightedness in our vision of education, financial constraints that compel lecturers to seek out multiple sources of income at the expense of research and reflection, frustration with the administrative and infrastructure-related hurdles that they have to jump over in the very institutions they work for, and a myriad of other factors. Wherever this attitude comes from, by dissociating the task of education from the knowledge of the real, it inadvertently reduces knowledge to a hollow tool, a technique for achieving a predefined result, regardless of its content. This attitude sees the knowledge that education imparts not as what reveals to us the aims that our lives should pursue, including our professional activity; instead, it sees this knowledge as shaped by the aims we choose for ourselves and, therefore, incapable of showing us what we ought to strive for.
The inversion is no less present in those institutions where the leadership aims fairly reliably to produce employable graduates. The emphasis on employability is not an unreasonable one. In the late 20th century, Kenya experienced a perfect storm of conditions that contributed to the current state of her universities. Severe blows to her economy meant that fewer resources were available. Economic globalization was also on the rise. This meant reduced demand for the agricultural products which formed the bulk of Kenya’s exports and, naturally, slashed national revenues. Therefore, she sought external funding to make possible the required expenditure. However, the conclusion of the Cold War in favour of neoliberal ideology meant that much of the funds she received came with neoliberal strings attached, including conditions that Kenya reduce state intervention in the economy, intervention which, some people argue, was necessary to serve the basic needs that were fast becoming dire in the country. Skilled, knowledgeable labour was urgently needed, and the policy of the state towards higher education reflected an awareness of this.
In tandem with all of these factors, the World Bank had published (now-discredited) studies demonstrating that there are lower economic returns on investments in higher education than in lower education. In response, Kenya downgraded her university funding. Naturally, universities diverted their reduced resources from the performance of intellectual work to basic tasks such as providing board and lodging for students. The eyes of university administrators increasingly turned away from the improvement of curricula, pedagogy, and research, and towards budgetary matters and schemes for generating revenue. “More students!” was their answer. Universities’ student populations burgeoned; the students, having their eyes on the future, demanded market-friendly qualifications. Universities increased their offerings of vocational and technical courses, with some private universities being established almost exclusively for the purpose of offering such courses. Thus, the university generated from within itself a momentum along the path that the state prescribed for it: the vocational university, aiming at producing skilled graduates capable of integration into the industry, exhibiting the conversion of knowledge into an instrument for the demands of the working world.
To the extent that an economy is governed by a capitalist paradigm, economic interactions between persons take the exclusive form of a contractual exchange motivated by the self-interest of the parties involved. In the economic sphere, others are reduced to objects towards whom there can be no real benevolence, towards whom there can be no real commitment – for each one seeks only the fulfilment of his own desires. Benevolence and commitment may exist in private relations: friendship, marriage, informal associations, etc. But strictly speaking, they have a very small place in economic interactions. They have little power to influence what goods or services will be produced, or the price of these goods and services. In a capitalist economy, this vocationalist turn of the universities means that knowledge is turned into a means to satisfy the desires of consumers and clients, because this is how profits are earned. And in an economy affected by globalization, these desires can tend in any number of directions, with the question of their morality being increasingly irrelevant.
The knowledge that primes people for “success” in the economic sphere (i.e., much of professional life), then, is that which makes people capable of satisfying all kinds of desires. This is extremely problematic. Human beings desire all kinds of things. Invariably, we end up disappointed (to put it mildly), because of natural events, the actions of other people, or our own actions. This makes us suffer. Suffering is inevitable. If our sufferings are small enough, we can escape them by satisfying some of the many desires that are still left to us in an attempt to crowd out the pain with pleasures, whether or not they are guilty pleasures. We console ourselves with the thought and experience that we still have something to live for. But some sufferings are so severe that there seems to be no way out of them. Your inability to resolve the problems of those for whom you care deeply; the loss of your beloved, when you have loved no one else; the realization that you are causing pain to those whom you love, and that you are unable to stop yourself from doing so; the stark belief of some addicts that they cannot overcome a habit that is wounding others and themselves; the frustration of having to perform meaningless tasks over a prolonged period of time…. In the face of such things, other pleasures can lose their taste, so to speak, and one is faced with a fundamental question: Is life worth living? Does life have a meaning, even when it turns out to be nasty and brutish? Does suffering, of any kind, have a meaning? Would it be better not to have been born? Would it be better not to exist?
If all that we live for is the fulfilment of desire, then the answer is: Obviously, suffering has no meaning – or, at least, not in itself. We may try to give meaning to our suffering by means of some other desire that it can serve to fulfil. This is what athletes do all the time. Train hard, and glory in the reward. But with really serious suffering, this seems not to be enough. And serious suffering happens often enough for this to be a significant fact. So, if education aims to impart knowledge that is oriented to the fulfilment of desire, then it fails to equip learners with the primary tool to find meaning in their lives and the lives of others, which is the justified conviction that they are meaningful. When someone is convinced, whether consciously or not, that their life has no meaning, then they try to escape from it. Getting drunk or high is one way to do this. Sex is another. So is suicide. All of these are steeply on the rise among Kenyan youth. And if we try to escape reality, then we are not confronting it and trying to change ourselves and the world around us. Our potential remains unfulfilled, and very many people – the entirety of the country, even – do not receive the benefits they might have if we had acted otherwise.
There is another problem. If education preaches the fulfilment of the desires of those around us, then much of our fate depends on what those people desire. In a society governed by a capitalist paradigm, those desires are turned egoistically inwards. To fulfil their desires is to strive to be acceptable to them for future gain. After all, if everyone is self-interested, why should anyone do anything for anyone if there isn’t something in it to get?
To become acceptable to someone, to serve as an asset to them, we have to act in accordance with the specific aims or purposes for which we serve them. This also implies that we have to act in accordance with the worldview that those purposes depend on. Every aim presupposes a worldview. Even the simple target of getting out of bed in the morning presupposes that it is worth the effort to get out of bed and live another day, that living is worthwhile, that my life and the life of everyone else like me is meaningful, that there is meaning, that things make sense, and that there is an origin of the Sense. But acting in accordance with a worldview doesn’t necessarily mean that we accept it. It is very possible, for example, to put in half-hearted effort into an assigned task for several hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, and hate what we are doing during most of that time.
If we do accept the worldview according to which we act as we serve the aims of others in our economic activity, then, at the least, we are consistent with ourselves. We are truthful. That itself implies a worldview: that we do not create our own meaning or the meaning of the world; that this meaning, if it exists, must have an origin outside of ourselves; and that we ought to act in accordance with this meaning. In short, we affirm that we are meant to live the truth. Such an affirmation is extremely demanding. It means that we do not determine what is worthwhile, what will give us true joy, what we ought to live for, but rather that we find it out, and that we courageously strive to live for it, no matter how difficult that may prove to be. Perhaps this is an ideal that we can only approach and never fully attain. To the extent that someone has such a worldview, the truth about what the world is, who he is, and who he is meant to be is no trivial matter. It configures the whole of his life, and all of its parts as well: what he does when he is alone; how he thinks of and treats his spouse, his family, his work and his colleagues, and total strangers; how he rests... For such a person, knowledge is the path that he treads in the journey of life. Knowledge is no mere means to the achievement of his aims. Rather, knowledge expresses and invites him to deepen an outlook on reality. Knowledge comes from, leads to, and is itself an act of living for the truth. This fact is what gives practical knowledge its importance. Once we know what we ought to live for, practical knowledge tells us how to do that.
On the other hand, if we do not accept the worldview according to which we act, we are liars. We lie with our actions, at the very least. This isn’t to say that we cannot sometimes do what others ask us to do, not for the reasons they want it done, but for our own purposes, integrating it into our own worldview. For example, a lawyer acting on the instructions of a client may do so because of a conviction that everyone deserves a defence, even though his client may be seeking a defence to add another barrier to his own confrontation of his well-concealed guilt. And the lawyer’s conviction is noble. The State has no right to punish someone on the basis of an allegation that it can’t prove, especially if that allegation comes from someone (a lawyer, for instance) engaged in confidential communication with the person who is allegedly guilty. Briefly put, the persons who act in the name of the State ought to strive as much as they can to act according to the truth, and by their actions, to bring truth into the world.
The lawyer’s situation in this case is different from the person who does not accept the worldview according to which he acts. The lawyer takes the actions he is instructed to perform and integrates them with a worldview, with the worldview that he holds to be true. Once again, we find fidelity to truth, to meaning, and to reality. On the other hand, the liar acts as if any and every worldview is worthy of being lived and manifested. Fundamentally, of course, this also implies a worldview: we are more capable of creating a worthwhile reality than whatever originated us and the world; we are the rightful originators of meaning and truth. We affirm that any of our whims deserves to be lived out to its final consequences. To the extent that someone holds such a worldview, the only truth about what things are that matters is whether they are capable of satisfying our whims. The only truth about ourselves that matters is what our whims happen to be at the moment, which one is strongest, and probably balancing this against the difficulty of satisfying that whim. As for what we are meant for, our whims reveal that to us. Everything becomes a mere instrument for our satisfaction, including knowledge itself. Knowledge is equated to the experience of desire and the quest to fulfil it. Of course, precisely because reality is much more than such a paradigm cares to admit, precisely because our meaning is found outside of ourselves, in the truth of things, then the liar ends up bitterly frustrated by the reality that constantly stands in his path.
Faced with this frustration and unhappiness, again, the liar escapes from reality or stops being a liar. Escaping from reality means attempting to live in a world of our own creation, a world where our whims are always satisfied. This implies an immense ignorance of the world and its dangers, or an attempt to insulate ourselves from them. It means consistent deceit of those around us to make them believe that we want what they want – for example, that we want our partner’s happiness while in reality we long for (or enact) the illusory thrill of a string of affairs, or that we want to meet our targets at work and even to surpass them while in reality we steal money, or, at least, time, from our employer on a daily basis. It also often means that we are naively ignorant of others’ capacity to identify our lies. It means that we do not learn to examine ourselves against the standard that reality poses to us and do the necessary work to live up to that standard. We do not become truthful or courageous, or even more happy. We lack the habits to be faithful even to our future selves. Our future selves are a reality. It is an important truth that we will probably continue to exist for another number of years. Therefore, it is also important to acknowledge that our present actions will have repercussions for us in the future. Our future selves are one source of the meaning of our present lives, and a path to the other paradigm, the one that finds meaning in the world. If we have to live for our future selves, after all, it is very important to find out what is good for any self, and therefore, what any self is, what we are, and why we exist. Even his own future interests are a source of meaning to which the liar lacks the resources to be faithful, to the extent that he is a liar. Practical knowledge, for him, becomes rather useless in the long run.
Education for “success”? Doesn’t sound like such a good idea to me.
This isn't to say that vocational training is unnecessary. Far from it! Every single human interaction involves human bodies. Human bodies need food and water. Food and water can be obtained from nature, but this task requires skills, know-how. Training people in trades, then, is crucial for the survival of countless Kenyans, not to mention the progress of many others who are frustrated in their desires for a higher standard of living.
But vocational training is not the only thing necessary, and reducing education to mean vocational training alone is a fatal mistake that we must avoid.
References:
Anecdotal evidence.
Bruni, Luigino. The Genesis and Ethos of the Market. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Peterson, Jordan. Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. Random House Canada, 2021.
Sawyerr, Akilagpa. “Challenges Facing African Universities: Selected Issues.” African Studies Review, vol. 47, no. 1, 2004, pp. 1-59.