The problems facing the students in secondary schools in Kenya

  

Date Posted: 3/22/2013 8:47:59 AM

Posted By: prey  Membership Level: Gold  Total Points: 1405

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The problems facing the students in secondary schools in Kenya

There are so many problems that affect the students in secondary schools in Kenya. However, the main ones include: student health, lack of money, transport, stress, faith, personal image, rainy season, media, bullying, too much parental care, gender issues and peer pressure.

1) Student health.
There are so many students in Kenya who go home every day because they are feeling unwell or even because they have bruised themselves. During this period of time that they are not in school, so much is taught which some teachers never repeat even after the students come back to school after healing. This puts them a step behind of all the other students

2) Lack of money.
Not all the students in Kenya have enough money to pay their school fees. Some are forced to go back home until they can be able to pay their school fees. This means that while the others are continuing with their studies at school, they might be doing house chores or even doing nothing at home. This is reflected in their academic results whereby their results during this period when they were not in school the whole time is a lot lower than their usual results.

3) Transport.
Road transport in Kenya is not always the best. Sometimes there are traffic jams that even take as long as fifteen minutes without making even a single movement. This means that the students who might be travelling by road transport might not always get to school on time. This causes some of them to be punished thus wasting even more time doing punishments instead of using this time to read. This affects day-scholars the most.

4) Stress.
Reading is fun for some people but there are some who find all the mental work involved very stressful. This stress ends up making

the students behave in an aggressive manner and it might lead to students striking or even fights that start for no good reason. The stress thus tends to distract students from their studies thus causing low academic performance.

5) Faith.
In Kenyan schools, you may find students from any religion learning in the same classroom with other students from different religions. If there is a religion that is more common than the other in the school or in the classroom, the other students from the dominant religion might tend to criticize the other students from the other religions which have fewer followers. This might lower the self-esteems of the students who are being criticized because of what they believe which then makes their academic performances to be lower than they are supposed to be.

6) Personal image.
Students usually want to protect their personal image and will go very far to make this possible. Some even refuse to read because they do not want to be given any bad nick names because of their reading. This makes them to score lower grades than they would have scored had they read and prepared for their exams properly.

7) The rainy season.
During the rainy seasons, not all the clothes will dry thus the students might end up with no uniform to wear at school, some because their clothes never dried and others because they saw no reason to wash them while it was raining. However, not all the teachers will listen to such excuses. The students without their uniforms are not allowed to enter the classroom until they are fully dressed. This tends to make them miss what was taught during these lessons that they were not in class thus making their grades to be lower than they would have been if they were allowed to learn together with the other students.

8) Media.
This includes the television, newspapers and even magazines which inform the students of what is going on in the other schools. There are some boarding schools in Kenya which never had an intension of striking until they read on the newspapers or even hear from other sources that other students from their favorite or neighboring schools have gone on a strike. This makes them also to strike because they do not want to be the odd ones.

9) Bullying.
Bullying affects almost every school in Kenya whereby the older and stronger students take advantage of the weaker and the younger students in the school to an extent of taking their food, clothes, money and other personal belongings from them by force. Those who do not obey the bullies or stand against them face very severe consequences which include physical pain or even stigma.

10) Too much parental care.
It is good to care for your child. However, there are some parents who overdo it to an extent of even going against the orders of the teachers. For example, some parents tell the teachers to give their children less homework in order to protect their children from the stress of thinking the whole day. Some even support their children when they are sent home for doing bad things. This makes the students to perform poorly at school academically because everything that the teachers tell the students to do is mainly for the sake of the good performance of the students thus challenging it would only make the students to perform poorly.

11) Gender issues.
There are some schools where girls are not supported financially by their parents who believe that girls cannot read. This makes them to have a hard time pleading with their teachers to allow them to learn with the other students even though they have not yet cleared their school fees. Such girls therefore perform more poorly than they would have if they had enough support.

12) Peer pressure.
There are some things that students do only to please their peers without even thinking of the consequences that such actions would have on them. For example, some students take harmful drugs to please their peers and end up wasting their lives living with an addiction that continues to damage their body even more every time they take these drugs which they are addicted to. Most of these drugs lower the concentration of the students during classes. Some of these drugs even affect the brain by lowering its ability to tackle questions and problems or even make the students to be confused thus lowering their academic performance.

All these problems can either be avoided or solved. However, this cannot be done by the students alone. Teachers, parents and students should all come together and discuss all these problems and their possible solutions if we ever want to improve the academic performance of the students in secondary schools in Kenya.

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