When I was a schoolboy, there was one practice that filled me with anxiety and left me with trauma: the publication of national exam results.
For me, it was second only to the stress and strain of the actual exams themselves, and even when I wasn’t sitting the exams myself, the embarrassment was vicarious.
Before you leap to conclusions, I was an average scholar. In fact, if the subject of maths was something one could have dropped after the mastery of basic addition, subtraction, division and multiplication, I might even say I was above average.
I always instinctively felt that English (language and literature), history and geography were really the only subjects that were worth any effort, and the rest were just punishment.
But back to the publication of results. To qualify for secondary school, we had to sit our first national exam, the Certificate of Primary Education or CPE, now known as the KCPE.
I am not sure what the practice is in Kenya nowadays with national exam results, but in my time, the results came out just after Christmas and were published and pinned to the headmaster’s office door for everyone to see.
If you had passed with flying colours or failed miserably, it was out there for all the world to see.
While it was all very well for those who had done well, it was a shameful experience for those who hadn’t.
Of course, it wasn’t just the students who had done poorly in their exams who were shamed but their parents or guardians, too, and this would just have the effect of piling on the pressure on the child who had not passed.
In my case, after CPE, I had been invited down to a holiday in Mombasa by a dear friend, who also happened to be related to me by marriage. One of his uncles and one of my aunts were married to each other.
I remember we drove back to Nairobi after a most enjoyable Christmas holiday, where we had explored Nyali and the surrounding areas and even tried, and failed, to gain entry to the hottest nightclub of the time. But perhaps that’s another story.
On arrival in Nairobi, we headed straight to school to pick up our results, only to arrive and find they had been posted on the headmaster’s door.
Around us we had our friends. Some were jubilant, knowing they had done enough to gain access to the great national secondary schools, including our own senior school.
Meanwhile, others were filled with gloom either because they might have to repeat Standard Seven or attend the infamous crammer at the gates of the Arboretum.
I got to thinking about those heady days recently after a court in Pretoria ruled that the National Senior Certificate (also known as the Matric) results for 2021 would be published on all media platforms.
This after the department (ministry) of basic education’s earlier decision not to publish the Matric results on public platforms had been successfully challenged.
The ministry had justified their non-publication policy by basing it on the recently promulgated Protection of Personal Information Act. They argued that in terms of the Constitution, everyone has the right to privacy, and this extends to matriculants.
Challenging the decision was civil rights organisation AfriForum, which mobilises Afrikaners, Afrikaans-speaking people and other minority groups in South Africa.
They argued that “the public excitement that accompanies the publication of matric results in the media serves as motivation for future matriculants. To water down the magnitude of the occasion will eventually undermine the pursuit of excellence in education”.
In the end, the judge decided that only the examination numbers of the students would be published in the media, but that no personal information or the identities of learners would be made public without their consent. The department did not oppose the decision.
Nonetheless, I tend to agree with the SA Communist Party, which said: “The publication of the results with learner details does not add any educational value.”