Your kid is an exam star? Great, but can they star in the tests life poses?

Thus we produce thousands of degrees from the universities every year but hotel owners continue to hire Kenyan chefs and Asian accountants because most of our graduates and school leavers have no skills.

Let’s do a quick quiz. I want you to think quickly of small firms that you know which you can call now – or in the next five minutes – and which can send over someone to do one of the following tasks.

And by firm I don’t rule out the exceptional guy who once did a good job and who is saved as ‘plumber’ in your phone; I am talking sober, professional people you can leave in your house alone as you pop out to the shops, who can give you an invoice, and to whom you can complain afterwards if you are not happy with the service.
Okay, here we go with the tasks: Fix a door lock. Repair a faulty oven. Replace a broken window. Fumigate a house. Fix a faulty tap. Service an electricity inverter system. Teach you or your child how to play a music instrument. Repair a faulty computer. Repair a mobile telephone. Do the books for a small business.

Now, a second question: how many young graduates can you think of, top of your head, who have approached you or are about to approach you for help with finding them a job?

If you are like me, you probably struggled to put names and faces to some if not most of the tasks above but could immediately think of several relatives, friends and in-laws in the latter category.
As you thumb through the newspaper silly season of examination stars (your columnist is part of the problem here but one day we will write about this lowlight in our journalism), think how many of today’s examination stars will be desperate job seekers five or so years from now, many of them simply unemployable?

This mismatch, more than anything else, is the problem at the heart of our education system (in addition to the situation where the government pretends to pay teachers who pretend to teach pupils who pretend to learn, in schools that pretend to have facilities). In our effort to provide “education for all” we have provided education for some, ignorance for many and false hopes for others.

This column has argued before that the idea of “free” education has, on top of lowering the quality through an influx of unsustainable numbers, destroyed the demand that parents previously had for a good education for their children. It is government to teach the kids, parents say, so let them do it anyway they want.

At the macro-level, however, we have done very little to change our education system from the one the colonialists built to churn out clerks and paper-pushers.

Thus we produce thousands of degrees from the universities every year but hotel owners continue to hire Kenyan chefs and Asian accountants because most of our graduates and school leavers have no skills.
Education has been reduced to the ability to do well in exams, not the ability to ask the right questions, acquire skills and apply knowledge.
Worse, the exams have been dumbed down to maintain the lie that UPE and USE are passing more kids every year, never mind that it is a conveyor belt dropping the ‘graduates’ to the real school of hard knocks; the street.

A friend gave the last PLE English examination script to his child who goes to an international school. The P4 child scored 98 per cent in the exam. Even if you discount for any natural smarts, the tens of thousands of actual P7 candidates that failed the subject tells you how bad a problem this is.

If your child is in a UPE school you have three choices: Move them to a private school; mobilise other parents and take over the school; or spend more time helping them with their homework. Their future depends on it.

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Two journalists of the Observer newspaper have sued Speaker Rebecca Kadaga after she suspended them because she disagreed with their reporting of Parliament. The reporters may, or may not have erred in their reporting – your columnist has no details yet – but the high-handed action by the Speaker is disappointing and worrying; what if she was commander-in-chief?

To this and other matters of abuse of office – including the tragicomic story of the police officers that were arrested carrying out a robbery – we shall soon return.

In the meantime, if you do find small firms offering those services above, do share on a postcard; they are real-life examples from my troubled existence with Kampala’s artisans.

dkalinaki@ug.nationmedia.com