How do we prepare graduates who can serve society?

Educationalists have called upon Kenyan universities to teach critical thinking skills and include social justice and transformation in their curriculum, in order to prepare graduates to serve their societies selflessly and diligently.

“We are challenged and threatened as a nation by individuals and young people who are eager to have a [senior] position today … Tomorrow, either they are at the top [politically] or are billionaires, working to the disadvantage of the people they are supposed to serve,” Professor Leah Marangu, former vice-chancellor at the Africa Nazarene University in Nairobi, told delegates at a recent conference in Nairobi, Kenya.

Called ‘Touching Hearts, Teaching Minds and Transforming Lives’, the three-day conference was held from 20-23 May and brought together scholars from Malawi, Kenya, Zimbabwe and the United States of America. It was held at Tangaza University College in Nairobi.

Gaps in teaching tools

Marangu said there were gaps in the teaching tools employed in Kenyan universities. The existing teaching curricula, she said, fails to inspire students to find solutions for quality of life improvements, such as boosting food security, combating hunger, drug abuse and family violence, and stressing the value of human dignity, social cohesion and harmony.

“We must review and update our curriculum to meet social and economic challenges. We must weave values into the curriculum to produce individuals capable of permeating the future society with moral integrity as they serve society,” Marangu told University World News, adding that students should be taught to have courage and speak out whenever they see an injustice or feel oppressed.

She said existing evils and social disharmony had emerged partly because students do not embrace the need for moral ethics and social norms to standardise behaviour.

She called for higher learning systems to inculcate a sense of nationhood, common humanity and good neighbourliness, as well as skills of reconciliation and conflict resolution.

Spirit of service

“We need to teach the value of responsibility with accountability. We need to build among our students a spirit of selflessness and sacrificial service. We need to begin to celebrate diversity instead of suppressing it. It is through the encouragement of being different in our thinking and behaviour that we develop geniuses,” Marangu said.

“Create a lecture hall environment where such minds can think freely. Universities can be centres where this transformation can take place. We must be purposeful to strategically plan those activities that result in positive character formation that produces graduates of moral integrity,” she said.

She called for universities to consider whether their teaching promotes “superficial forms of knowledge” that fail to prepare students to live with themselves and others. “When we concentrate on mastery of knowledge, pumping it into an unchanged heart, we do damage to ourselves. An educated person whose heart is touched will use his or her education productively and effectively,” she said.

In a paper released to the conference, Margaret Aringo, from Christ the Teacher Institute for Education, a wing of the host university, said the Kenyan system of higher education focuses mainly on good examination results.

She said all appraisals were made “on the basis of performance and not life”. Educators in Kenya, as a result, tend to pump knowledge into learners by spoon-feeding them, relying on rote learning, even in higher education, to pass examinations, she said.

“This kind of knowledge is sterile and dead. It provides no growth and development of intellect and mind. It separates tutors from learners, treating students as listening objects,” she said.

This form of education habituates students to living in politically oppressive systems, where they neither ask questions nor critically evaluate the world in which they live, and so are not moved to make or push for any changes, she said.

No critical thinking

John Theuri, a lecturer at Catholic University of Eastern Africa, said this reality prevailed despite all universities claiming to be teaching their students ‘critical thinking’.

He said students become conditioned to expect a teacher-centred, text-driven classroom form of learning. This, said Theuri, inhibits students’ ability to think for themselves, question assumptions, analyse and synthesise events and go ahead to develop new assumptions and test them against facts.

“Questioning is the cornerstone of critical thinking which in turn is the source of knowledge formation and as such should be taught as a framework for all learning,” he said, adding that many graduates leave university without having developed key life skills during their studies.

Dr Marcella Momanyi, also of the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, proposed that lecturers receive continuous training on the basis of curricula that respond to social change. She also said issues that affect social wellbeing, such as religious radicalisation, should be integrated into tertiary education studies.

Societies with better teaching in social justice and wellbeing forge better and more mature democracies and are more likely to embrace tolerance and peace, she said.

Continuous training would ensure lecturers have skills to impart that are relevant to younger generations, so that they can more effectively engage with students. “They could teach them how to use the internet in a better way that promotes social justice,” Momanyi said.