COVID-19: PHILOSOPHICAL INPUT(TWO)

COVID-19:  PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE II

SUSPENSION OF EDUCATION

A. THE BACKGROUND

Whenever there is a disaster, war or pandemic as it is the case with Covid 19, different social institutions get their share of the havoc. There is no doubt that religious institutions across the world have been affected. Education as a social has also been affected going by the number of closure of schools and higher institutions of learning. When covid19 became a reality in Kenya, among the first educational institutions to be closed include. African Nazarene and Daystar universities which could not wait for order from the government on the same; their closure was followed by government directive of the immediate closure of schools and higher institutions learning. There has been a rumour through social media of the possibility of re-opening of Educational institutions and a likelihood of the postponement of national exams. At the same time a good number of schools and other Educational institutions have been converted into quarantine canters, and when the students report back they will be required to use the same facilities that have been used for quarantine. One wonders how this will psychologically affect the educational process in these institutions 

B. THE PURPOSE

This perspective piece purposes to determine whether closure of Educational institutions and subsequent conversion of some of them into quarantine centres has occasioned suspension of Education in general and learning in particular.

C. THE METHOD

Analysis

D. THE QUESTION

Has Covid-19 occasioned the suspension of Education in Kenya?

D. THE DISCUSSION

I. 'EDUCATION' HAS BEEN SUSPENDED

I infer that to the extent that education is partially formal, yes it is suspended. In common parlance Education is 'Synonymous'   with a set of buildings, with professionals known as Teachers carrying out methodically  a  process known as teaching,  based on some pool known as curriculum and whose output can be assessed through a standardised tests. This means that when teachers stop teaching there is no education, when there is no learning space known as classroom or lecture hall there is no education. We cannot talk of Education when we are not sure whether our students are following the syllabus of their respective classes and subjects. So practically speaking, Education has ceased.

II. BRIDGING THE GAP: THE CONCEPT OF SCHOOLING

While Education in its Latin etymology -Educare, Educere-refers to the general process of bringing up and leading a learner out of the undesired state of ignorance, Schooling connotes passage through a system. A schooled person is one who has passed through a system and has been certified to have gone through it. Education however is a wide world that may include but not limited to schooling. Education is formal, informal and non formal. It takes place anywhere and it is akin to what we call spirituality in religion. Back to schooling, the distinguishing mark of schooling is standardised testing. Heavy premium is laid on doing formative and summative tests. After the test we grade the schooling   products (almost the same way we grade tea packs at Ketepa factory) into grade A, Second Class, Grade E. Much emphasis is laid on grading such that the mark of education has been the grade a learner was awarded. If for instance a schooled person got A -plain they are then socially labelled as most educated, if he/she got an E, the society sees not just as a failure but also as a mis-educated brute, a paria and a social misfit not good for market consumption.  What this means is that the aim of Education is reduced to serving the market. Most markets are served by factories in the similar manner schools are fashioned to produce human automatons and machines. These machines cannot think on their own. They are fashioned according to the demands of the market owner who in turn gives form to the factory that the school is, and calls it Formal education when actually it's supposed to be called Market schooling. In formal education, once the school stops, production stops-education stops. COVID 19 has forced the schooling factory to stop, so no more education till Covid goes away. No more production. The clamour for so called market driven courses is not anything strange in Kenya and by market driven we mostly mean blind STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths). At the end of the day we produce Scientists without labs and incapable of new inventions, Technologists who are copy cats, Engineers who can draw good designs for roads but cannot actualise what they draw, Mathematicians who cannot survive outside a classroom. This implies that schools were closed way before covid19. We are now operating from quasi educational   time zone yet real Education is a cura personalis- a holistic process entailing not only the cognitive dimension but also dialogical, normative and creative dimensions with impossibility of any practical suspension 

III. EDUCATION HAS NOT BEEN SUSPENDED

One of the philosophical anthropological definitions of man is Homo Cognoscendi (The knowing man) or homo educandus (The educable man). These definitions point to the fact the being X if X is human being then X is intrinsically and necessarily an epistemological being. In ontology when we say that man is necessarily epistemological we mean that all factors held constant it is not possible to even imagine a human being who cannot   not know without landing into contradictions.  This being the case, formal education and schooling can only be counted as a small portion of education, and that to suspend education is to suspend the being of a homo cognescendi- which is impossibility.  The desire to know and to be educated in man is innate. For instance, while schools have closed, many learners at the moment are doing everything and anything about to understand Covid 19 through Social media updates, mainstream media and Google search. This is education going on outside the school factory building and happening in what we would metaphysically call the real school, the real life outside the walls of a schooling factory.

E. THE CONCLUSION: THE REAL AIM OF EDUCATION

Close school or leave them 'open' Education goes on. It's lifelong. It's heutagogical. It's androgogical. If education is a lifelong force then its Aim should be LEARNING TO LEARN or learning to live. Education should enable the graduate and non graduate to 'Know themselves'(Socrates) and to keep learning till death because for humans , to live is to learn and to learn is to live .And this is what constitutes EUDAIMONIA(True happiness). Market is an insufficient aim of education.