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{
    "id": 1057551,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1057551/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 340,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Dagoretti South, JP",
    "speaker_title": "Hon. John Kiarie",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 13322,
        "legal_name": "John Kiarie Waweru",
        "slug": "john-kiarie-waweru"
    },
    "content": "important. That debate is what has led to the imbalanced investment in education. If you look across the country, you will be able to compare how we value our ECE by the investment that we have put on ECDE to date. Are we putting as much in ECDE as we have in primary schools? Have we put as much in ECDE as we do in secondary schools? Have we done as much as we do for tertiary institution, colleges and universities? It is very clear that, as a country, we have not been investing in ECE. What is critical is that I, as an educator while still in the university, was able to carry out a research that eventually established that children born in Africa are born brighter than even some of those born in western countries. This is, however, reversed the moment they show up in schools and our schools are not up-to par to continue with the development that the child had started when they were at home. Hon. Temporary Deputy Speaker, this research tells us that as a country, we are failing our own children at a very early stage in life even before they have started their formal education. It is said that a good ECE should spur and activate a child’s natural willingness to learn. That, a child is born naturally willing to learn and what we do at ECE is to activate their natural will to learn. I support this Bill because I see the effort that is being put into making ECE better. To my mind, this Bill, is seeking to standardise the quality if training of our children at a very early stage. One thing that I learnt from my life is that when we were all in nursery school and Standard I, we were all scientists. We were all artists. At what point do we normally lose those things? We start losing them when our instructors lose interest in teaching us some of those things. Any child is born to do anything else the other child can do. However, if we lose it at ECE, that child will never catch up. Some of those children are born ambidextrous; they are able to write with both their hands. They go to school and they are caned for not writing with the right hand. Some of the things we are doing in some of those schools are actually taking away from the child rather than adding to them. What I would like to see is that after we pass this, we are able to start identifying talent very early in a child and develop it through their learning. Even as we speak about Early Childhood Development (ECD) education in the form it has been presented here, in this mediated Bill, I would like to add that, as a country, we will have to very seriously start rethinking this model of institutionalising our children for 16 years from ECD all the way to university. Let us give home- schooling a thought. Let us start building policies around home schooling. Let us start thinking about the future of education and not what is a colo…."
}