NO doubt there are modern Mr Gradgrinds* who consider the ant and the bee examples more suitable for Africans than the birds of the air and the lilies of the field.* Napoleon attempted, without conspicuous success, to exclude political and speculative subjects from the instruction given in the colleges of France. Authoritarians in Kenya are not likely to be more successful.
The reader may consider that too much attention has been paid to these false educational ideals. He may be assured that in Africa the obscurantist is an even greater danger than the exploiter. What the African in Kenya needs is knowledge, enlightenment, the acquisition of the appetite which makes men seek the truth. He needs these exactly as the whole human race needs them. He not only needs them but wants them. No people in the world has a keener appetite for education or a greater aptitude for learning. They have as much right as we to understand the world we both live in, and far greater need of knowledge as a defence against oppression.
Abridged
* Thomas Gradgrind is a character from Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times (1854), a school board Superintendent whose educational philosophy was relentlessly utilitarian. For him, to teach is to pour facts into the ‘little pitchers’ that are boys and girls; a teacher is a fact-checker who piously no-platforms anyone whose worldview does not accord with his own. ‘We don’t want to know anything about that, here’ he scolds Sissy Jupe when she explains that her father works for Sleary’s circus. ‘You mustn’t tell us about that, here.’
* The ant and the bee are insects famous for co-ordinated industry and obedient productivity; the birds of the air and the lilies of the field are symbols of happy-go-lucky independence. The reference is to Matthew 6:25-34, where Jesus says that earthly necessities and anxieties should not dominate our lives. “But seek ye first the kingdom of God,” Jesus ends, “and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”