Many cultures and colors: one goal

Traveling over long distances can be exhausting, but sometimes it can be also rewarding depending on the comfort of the flight and the route. As I returned home from the Global Media Forum, I had over four hours to wait for my flight from Germany to Nairobi. I took advantage of those long hours to read some newspapers.

Even though I was not looking for articles on education, all the newspapers I read touched on this topic, reminding me that it is an issue that affects all areas of our life. Articles in a German publication and in a publication from the Gulf region that I read took up the same questions of culture and education.

The German publication stressed the importance of German institutions becoming more international so that Germany can produce excellent students and scientists able to compete on a global platform. My father would agree. He encouraged us to attend schools beyond our home area. His thought was that by living in these cultures, we would learn some soft skills beyond the subjects taught in class, such as intercultural communication and tolerance of people different from us. He, therefore, was happy to let me study in Germany with others from more than 10 other cultures. I described this before as a ‘global classroom.’ The article proposed that more universities in Germany should have a strategy to internationalize themselves. I think Germany has already started this, taking an example of the master’s program I did, which was not only composed of international students and teachers but was also taught partly in English and in German.

Globalization at our finger tips

The other article from a publication in Dubai posed the question: Who are internationally educated children? The publication asserted that children benefit from stepping outside of their own culture. Globalization and its effects on education and on life in general demand from us that we extend our knowledge beyond our horizons. The so-called ‘international students/learners’ are more tolerant of different cultures, races, religions, opinions, and, as such, may be less prejudiced. Even later when they start working, they are more marketable on the job market, as multi-cultural skills are one of the strengths that international companies look for.

In Kenya, there are just a few international students, either on exchange or learning English from China and Turkey. I think the low number is mostly the result of doubt about the quality of education here. Kenya also needs a strategy to internationalize its education system – especially at the universities – to make it attractive for international students and professors.

"The world is my classroom"

When I returned home after my two-year master’s course, the only things of any value I had were my laptop and my camera. Before I got too worried about having to start life all over again, I quickly reminded myself of the non-material possessions that I came back with. One of those was living and learning with people from different cultures – almost like learning in the classroom of the world! I wish this was an experience everyone could have, especially those from my own country.
The 2007-2008 post-election violence is four or five years behind us, although images of that dreadful period are still fresh in some people’s lives. During the violence, education for scores of children was disrupted as communities fought against each other and people fled from their homes. Most schoolchildren, including my younger siblings, began to ask questions about which groups their classmates and their teachers came from as the situation deteriorated.

When I went to school as a child, I could not differentiate between my friends on the basis of which community they came from. In fact, because I attended a primary school in the country where majority of the population is from my ethnic group, I was always excited to meet and interact with classmates from other groups. In secondary school, which I attended in the capital, Nairobi, the mix of communities was very diverse. Learning in such environments was always every enriching.

Of course, this was not without the usual stereotypes. Some groups are well-known for certain skills and as a result are almost expected to take on a certain career. Some people do study according to their stereotypes, but not always. These stereotypes are because of their cultures, their economic activities or even how they interacted with the colonialists. For example, most of the people from my community are best known for being athletes, watchmen and police officers.

Wearing patriotism proudly

Our gift in athletics is probably first of all genetic. Second, our location in the highlands is said to be the best for athletes to train. As for being police officers and guards, this stems from the years of the former president Daniel Moi, who is said to have favored his own community. Most of those employed as police went through basic education and were assured of having jobs.

Other communities are known to be agile business people and traders, while others still are known to be academics. And some are known to be good farmers. Some teachers and even parents may also treat students differently especially if they strongly believe in the stereotypes and thus reinforce these while teaching or while at home. This may or may not affect one’s education. However, this is not a common practice – especially as our generation strives to steer away from tribalism.

My friends and me - on different paths than our parents

Emmy wrote that people increasingly need to be better qualified to find jobs in Kenya. The situation in Kenya is different from that in Germany, of course. But here we young people also need more and more qualifications to get a good job – and many of us actually have these credentials. I talked with my girlfriends about how our educational training and our lives as a whole have changed compared with our parents’. We have been friends for years. Some of us even went to the same kindergarten, so we were educated in the German school system at the same time.
Five of us finished Gymnasium with an Abitur, a diploma that allowed us to study at a university afterwards. And two of my friends first finished at a Realschule and then did their Abitur at a Gymnasium specializing in economics (here I wrote more about the German school system). Afterwards, they finished vocational training. One of them now studies on the weekends alongside her job.

The majority of our parents, in contrast, didn’t study at university. Four of us are the first ones in their families to go on to college. But this is not the rule in Germany. If you take 100 children whose parents didn’t go to college, 24 will go on to university themselves. But when you look at 100 children of academics, statistics show that 71 of them will attend university.

But our academic degrees aren’t the only difference between our education and that of our parents. Six of us have studied abroad or worked while travelling in another country (Pavel wrote more here about gap years). No wonder that all of us speak English decently. That is a contrast to our parents: Most of them know only a little English. But, after all, they didn’t need it for being successful in their jobs anyway. Often our fathers earned enough money to support their families. Thus, our mothers didn’t have to work full time and could care for us children.

While we learn, live abroad, and make plans for our free time, our parents had very different worries at our age − particularly the ones who didn’t study. My father had already bought a house when he was my age. My mother had just had her second child; her first one − me − was already four years old. None of us seven friends bear that much responsibility. All of us are unmarried, and no one of has a child or a house.

Our generation has been taught to be flexible and mobile

After all, why should we plan on building a house? We, the young work force, are supposed to be flexible and willing to move. One of my friends, for instance, was told at the beginning of her training for becoming a teacher that, after finishing their training, the future teachers wouldn’t be able to choose where they work. The state would appoint them to schools they would be needed at. Whether they had a house in another city wouldn’t play a role. Of course, things aren’t very different when it comes to the private sector, but at least you can choose your employer more freely.

I don’t want to say that this is negative. We are enjoying these freedoms that have also been made possible by our parents. It is great to speak English fluently and to have lived in different places worldwide. At the same time, it’s amazing how much our way of planning our future has changed from that of our parents, how many more unknown variables we must deal with. While our parents thought already in their mid-20s that they would become old in the town they had been born in, some of us don’t even know what the five next years will bring.

Ultimately, I don’t think it’s just more qualifications that the job market demands – but also more flexibility.