By Morris Wambua

They told me I was doing well.

And why wouldn’t they?

From the moment I walked into the dusty classroom — Mr. Muange's Standard One Classroom, clutching my oversized bag and staring wide-eyed at the chalkboard, my worth was measured in numbers.

A pupil’s life was one long race, they said, and the path to success was simple: you run, you don’t look back, and you don’t stop until you’re number one.

It was the creed of the 8-4-4 education system, and like every other child in my generation, I absorbed it without question.

The 8-4-4 system: eight years of primary education, four years of secondary, and four years of university.

It sounded neat and tidy, but it masked a machine that was anything but. It was designed in the
1980s with the notion that churning out competitive individuals would build a competitive nation.

And in a way, it succeeded.

We became very good at competing—with each other, with other schools, with the ghosts of our own past performances.

The pressure to succeed weighed so heavily that I barely noticed what was missing.

Looking back, I see that system for what it was: a well-oiled competition factory.

Every exam was a stage, every grade a judgment, every end-of-term report an official record of where you stood in the grand hierarchy.

The irony?

We rarely questioned why we were competing or what we were competing for.

We were told that grades would somehow translate to greatness, and the school system promised to reward the top scorers with a golden future. But once I left that world, I was left with a nagging question: where was the real prize?

In real life, nobody handed out medals for memorizing facts or acing tests.

Life demanded collaboration, flexibility, empathy—all qualities our education system left in the dust in its quest to build a nation of rank-holders.

We were built for individual glory, but life demanded teamwork.

I could memorize facts about global history, recite literature texts, and solve complex equations, but when I got my first job and was asked to lead a team, I realized my education hadn’t prepared me for this.

All those years of school, and I was left woefully unprepared for the thing that mattered most: how to work with other people.

To make sense of it, I had to re-evaluate the roots of this system. 8-4-4 was a product of its time, a response to an industrial-era mindset that imagined education as a series of standardized
steps—input knowledge, test for knowledge, output a “productive” citizen.

However, what it created was a generation of academic warriors who knew how to compete but struggled to collaborate.

We were given tools to climb over each other to the top, not the skills to build a ladder for everyone to rise together.

I often wonder about the price of that relentless focus on competition.

In school, friendships were rarely genuine partnerships because they were built within a zero-sum game.

Your success was always tinged with someone else’s failure.

I remember the quiet triumph of beating my friends in exams but also the odd loneliness of being at the top.

Even as a child, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. That maybe success shouldn’t come with such a sense of isolation.

Now, as I sit here reflecting, I think about how different my life might have been if school had taught us to help each other, to collaborate, to build each other up.

How much time and energy did we waste, scrambling up a ladder that went nowhere?

I think about what I’ve learned since, mostly through trial and error, in the world outside school.

Out here, competition is meaningless if it doesn’t produce something of value for everyone involved.

But back in school, winning was the only value we knew.

A few year later, a radical transformation happened, and now we have a new system—the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC).

On the surface, CBC seems like an antidote to the ills of 8-4-4.

It’s filled with terms like “learner-centered,” “experiential learning,” and “skills development.”

In theory, CBC sounds fantastic.

It promises to teach children practical skills, to make learning interactive, to get kids out of the classroom and into “real-world” situations.

But in practice… let’s just say there’s a surreal humor to it that rivals the finest satire.

Under CBC, my friend's child recently went to school with a live chicken.

Not a model chicken, not a drawing of a chicken—a living, clucking, very confused bird.

He was supposed to learn some valuable lesson about animal care or responsibility or whatever it was that CBC was aiming for. But from what I could tell, all he learned was that chicken are noisy, they poop a lot, and that transporting them on public transport invites strange looks from strangers.

Elsewhere, children were sent to the marketplace to sweep.

I imagine the architects of CBC must have sat around a table and thought, “Yes, we need to prepare children for real life."

"Let’s make them sweep a public marketplace. That will teach them the value of labor!”

The result?

Children with dust-covered faces, sweeping alongside bewildered stall owners who had no idea what to make of this educational field trip.

It’s almost comical, but there’s a serious flaw here.

CBC has lofty ambitions, but it’s executed with a kind of performative earnestness that misses the mark.

By attempting to make education more “practical,” it has ended up making learning into a series of bizarre, isolated experiences.

A child holding a chicken doesn’t automatically understand responsibility; a child sweeping a marketplace isn’t necessarily learning the value of hard work.

For these experiences to mean something, they need to be connected to larger lessons.

Instead, CBC seems to be throwing activities at children, hoping something sticks.

If 8-4-4 was a relentless push to the top, CBC feels like a chaotic sideshow, where education is broken down into random episodes that seem disconnected from any coherent purpose.

One system was obsessed with results; the other seems to have no clear direction at all.

What both systems lack is a grounding philosophy that aligns with the realities of life today.

The world has changed, yet our education systems are either stuck in the past or flailing wildly in the present.

We don’t need a system that pits children against each other in a race to the top. Nor do we need one that sends them to school with poultry or asks them to perform empty tasks in the name of “experiential learning.”

What we need is an education that prioritizes critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and the ability to collaborate—skills that are essential for a complex, interconnected world.

Imagine building a system that teaches children not just to solve equations, but to question assumptions.

Imagine if, instead of focusing on being better than the person sitting next to them, students were encouraged to work together on real projects, tackling real-world problems that matter to
their communities.

Imagine if schools taught empathy as seriously as they teach mathematics, or if they placed as much emphasis on mental health as they do on physical education.

We need an education system that reflects the world we live in—a world where knowledge is no longer scarce, where information is at our fingertips, and where the greatest challenges we face cannot be solved alone.

The real purpose of education should be to create not competitors, but collaborators, not isolated achievers but compassionate citizens.

In the end, what school did to me was this: it trained me to compete, but left me ill-prepared for life.

It taught me to run fast but not where to run. And it took me years to unlearn what I had been taught—to understand that true success isn’t about being number one but about helping everyone get to where they need to be.

We have a long way to go in reimagining our education system. But as we look toward the future, I hope we remember that children aren’t just blank slates or empty vessels to be filled with facts and
figures.

They are whole, complex beings with potential that goes beyond their ability to pass exams or sweep marketplaces.

The real lesson for us, the adults, is to create a system that nurtures the humanity in each child.

Because the future doesn’t need more competitors; it needs more collaborators, more thinkers, more dreamers.

And perhaps, one day, it will also need fewer people asking why they spent their childhoods carrying chicken to school.