Reflections on Underutilised Educational Potentials

Every so often, life presents a moment that calls us to pause, reflect, and recognise the unseen hands shaping our collective future. Kenya has been a hotbed of debates about the role of education in a community’s progress, hence the glorified position of teachers. On 1st December 2025, the Daily Nation carried a story about the predicament of PhD holders in Kenya, casualties of underemployment at best, if not joblessness. At a time when the world is talking of knowledge- and tech-led influence, a critical relook at how a nation regards and treats her teachers cannot be more timely. 

The Triad Analogy – A Weak Centre

In the grand order of attaining proficiency in any discipline, the progression is clear: learn, practise, teach. However, like in any other triad, the centre is always the glue binding the other two. A weak centre inevitably produces a weak whole. In higher education—especially within STEM disciplines—the insufficient exposure of many instructors to industry-grade practice and real-world dynamics has diminished their effectiveness. A parallel can be drawn from the canonical sequence of the theological virtues: faith, hope, and love. Faith is admirable and love is supreme, yet without hope the triad collapses into despair, weakening the entire structure. So it is with teaching and training—when the core is fragile, the collective outcome is compromised. Ill-equipped classrooms and laboratories, coupled with persistent capacity gaps, leave instructors poorly positioned to meet the rigorous expectations of education systems such as Kenya’s new Competency-Based Education (CBE) framework. It is evident that the government has given priority to STEM pathways as the route to industrialisation, and eventually to the aspirational First World.

The Pracademics Revolution Challenge

From the above angle of reference, a strong argument follows for STEM-oriented universities: We need to add more pracademics to the pool of academics at universities, a new tribe of industry-exposed academics who have practised adequately, to help transform our university lecture halls and labs into factories producing adaptive, work-ready graduates to resolve the paradox of unintended consequences, which I have referred to severally as “drops of skills in an ocean of academic qualifications”. 

These reflections point to the fact that our First World dream cannot be achieved, especially in today’s world witnessing an accelerating knowledge-doubling curve, until we rescue Kenya from being a hotbed of contradictions, where knowledge and thought leaders are presumed to be volunteers in a free enterprise under normal circumstances, if not modestly compensated at best. The dominant limiting mentality among key decision makers is to expect knowledge workers to volunteer extra engagement hours for free and remain frugal, yet hefty compensation packages are reserved for a cadre more aptly described as “perpetual travellers and ceremonial noisemakers” —and even that label is a euphemism, considering the magnitude of extravagance their conduct imposes on the economy.

From Hotbed to Seedbed

To become a seedbed that can germinate progressive solutions, to make Kenya the real Silicon Savanna, and to honour the dignity of knowledge, the country must urgently reconsider how knowledge workers, her teachers and trainers, can be facilitated with bespoke compensation rates and privileges and to adaptively reskill and receive adequate exposure in suitable practical industry settings, for the centre to hold and make a strong chain of producing work-ready graduates.

Way Forward with Examples from the Mining Sector

Kenya’s nascent mining sector offers vast space for progressive knowledge- and tech-led ideas and innovations to take root with a critical mass of the youth. Often, legacy thinking can be a greater barrier to sector transformation than legacy systems. The initiative by the Mining Engineers Society of Kenya (MESK), a society mainly made up of the youth, to recognise and honour the Mining Educators of the Year 2025 stands out as a model of forward-thinking and well-placed emphasis. Other professional bodies would do well to emulate this example as a start in intentional cultural re-orientation. Let us see the Government appointing more of our scholars to spearhead policy and technology development in key sectors with huge unexploited potentials, such as the mining sector, and in technology sectors for today’s increasingly digital society.