Education Abroad: Kenya's Curious Bottleneck

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Kenya, Africa's newest nation, has a primary school system that enrolls a generous 80% of eligible-age children, a secondary school bottleneck that drastically cuts down advancement, and a post-secondary system that further constricts the flow so that the country's ultramodern, $11 million Royal College is left scandalously underpopulated.

Primary schools, half of them still run by Christian missionaries, now enroll 1,000,000 children, but secondary schools have fewer than 25,000 students and are falling back compared with needs. In 1962 the secondary schools could take only an eighth of all primary graduates; by 1966 they will be able to take only a twentieth. And before secondary graduates can enter college in Nairobi's branch of the new University of East Africa, they must take two extra years of "sixth form" in schools so limited that the entire country has only 1,000 sixth-formers.

As a result, the Royal College is desperately short of students. It aims to enroll about 6,000, now has only 550. With its outsize faculty of 109, the college maintains, for example, one math course for two students, one geology class for one student. Thus curiously balked at home, Kenya's secondary graduates beg or borrow to get a higher education overseas. Hundreds flocked to the U.S. in recent years as part of Justice Minister Tom Mboya's "airlift," which provided scholarships to U.S. colleges. Kenya now has 1,150 students in the U.S., 1,400 in Britain, 200 behind the Iron Curtain.

Kenya might logically bypass the sixth form and let secondary graduates into the Royal College. "We are wasting people in the name of standards," says Chief Education Officer K. K. Mwendwa. But new nations understandably hesitate to lower the standards of what they have that is good, and until Kenya can build a substantial link between primary schools and colleges, it seems fated to go on being a strange combination of the adequate, the inadequate and the opulent.