On the 5th of June I asked: Is being mentally healthy so complex?
As I have been waiting for the answers to come flooding my way, my home country Kenya is degenerating, it seems, into total riotous madness; allegedly, attributed to an increase in taxes.
As it has been slowly going down this path, president Ruto opened the floodgates and said that he was willing to dialogue. A very risky and somewhat misinformed idea in my humble opinion1. But since the president is in the mood to talk and is also willing to indulge the wishes of the Kenyan citizenry, here goes my futile attempt at asking for something.
(I wasn’t part of the peaceful protests and protesters, and I am not planning to ever get involved. And if you are interested in reading my reasoning into it all then here it is.)
I would like to add to the Gen-Z wish list of what I think the president should also consider looking into.
(And I can make this wish because it not only looks apparent that Gen-Zs were speaking for everyone, but it also looks like the tax protests are slowly morphing into something else. Therefore, before the constitutional daggers are drawn from both sides and both sides start slinging axes, knives and guns at each other, let me make my wish.)
Listening to President Ruto speak on Sunday evening, after the tax protests of the previous two weeks, there was something that he said that caught my -psychology- sensitive ears.
That is, the issue of education.
An issue he had promised to look into during his presidential campaigns.
He wasn't alone in this type of thinking.
But the questions that kept nagging at me, even as he doubled down on the education rhetoric was: is education really the great equalizer?
Does he even know what is being taught in this curriculum and the psychological impact its having presently and will consequently have in the future?
Might president Ruto be funding his own demise?
Has president Ruto fallen prey to the 16th Century enlightenment heresy that -in nutshell said that - “education is the great equalizer”?
Did he drink the same dawa as Bob Marley, who after denigrating education as a fool's errand, only to turn around at the tail-end of his life and say that education is the key to liberation?
You might be wondering to yourself: what do all these questions have to do with mental health?
Here’s my answer!
The young people out there in the streets, we are incessantly being told, are hopeless, disillusioned, in despair, depressed, jobless (etc.)
That being the case I would also like to let you know that every -depressed, suicidal, hopeless, hapless (etc.) -patient walking into a therapist office thinks or assumes that it has something to do with lack of information; a deficiency of knowledge. Therefore, the therapist is seen as the expert; the repository of knowledge that is key to unlocking what is wrong with the client.
Therefore, president Ruto and any run of the mill therapist is having to deal with the same kind of client; the only difference is that presently in Kenya a therapist has no constitutional right2 to kill his patient.
Which raises and even more fundamental question: What is the ultimate goal of education system?
Is to get jobs?
Is it to get equality as some are defining it?
Is it hedonistic pride-full meritocratic happiness?
Are these the ultimate incentives that we are trying to tie to the educational system of Kenya?
Has he fallen prey to the 18th Century socialization theories and theorists, influenced by Jean Jacques Rousseau’s man is born free but is everywhere in chains mantra, and who have come to believe that “education is the saviour of the masses”?
If that is the case, and we are just evolved apes3, then does it really matter if we get an education or not?
And does it matter what type of education we get if we are just random atoms bombarding against one another in this undesigned universe4?
I ask these questions because, according to president Ruto Himself, educational knowledge, without really thinking through what our kids are really being taught, is deadly.
And economist Thomas Sowell would echo that sentiment, caution us and say:
“…. Considering the enormous range of human knowledge, from intimate personal knowledge of specific individuals to the complexities of organizations and the subtleties of feelings, it is remarkable that one speck in this firmament should be the sole determinant of whether someone is considered knowledgeable or ignorant in general…. How much knowledge there is depends on where we draw the line on the spectrum of probabilities. Within a given probability requirement for "knowing," how much is known varies enormously from one area of human life to another, and from one historical era to another, and of course from one person to another. Because the arena of decision making almost always exceeds the arena of knowledge, there must be belief-or at least hope-to fill in the gaps where there is no knowledge. This means that the ratio of knowledge to belief may also vary enormously from one aspect of life to another…”5
Therefore,
“…The growing complexity of science, technology, and organization does not imply either a growing knowledge or a growing need for knowledge in the general population….”6
That being said, is it time to relook at the incentive-istic narratives attached to the education system?
Is it time to relook, whether as the president of Kenya or otherwise, at the philosophical, psychological and even theological underpinnings of what we know, how much we know, how well we know it and why we know it all in the first place?
For an in-depth exploration of this topic check out my upcoming book The Love of Christ Jesus and Mental Health.
I simply say that because one cannot talk to a faceless crowd known as “society” and one simply cannot ask the opinion of all 53 + million Kenyans that live in this country if one is to make a decision on taxes. That is not how a constitutional republic works. This is a recipe for total anarchy! The economist Thomas Sowell makes this case in his great work, Knowledge and Decisions.
The current curriculum also known as Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) is teaching our young ones that they are just Darwinian evolved apes.
Picking from Darwinian’s On The Origin of Species, Sigmund Freud formulated his psychological theories in a “godless” universe and neuroscientist, Richard Dawkins has gone on to observe that this world is self-designed and therefore there is no need to postulate a creator “god” who made the world.
Knowledge and Decisions by Thomas Sowell
Ibid.