The news from Kenya is a grim reminder that the thin veneer of civilisation can be torn away in an instant. Students at a British-backed school in Nairobi have been charged with murder, and the international community, in its infinite wisdom, has chosen to praise the school’s safety protocols. This is a pathetic display of colonial nostalgia masquerading as progress.
Let us be clear: the murder of a fellow student is a symptom of a deeper rot. It is not a malfunction of protocol but a failure of moral education. We are witnessing the collapse of the very idea of discipline, a cherished Victorian export to the colonies. The Victorians understood that empire was built on order, on the rigid enforcement of rules, on the belief that civilisation could be imposed from without. But what happens when the empire retreats, leaving behind a hollow shell of its institutions?
These schools, modelled on British public schools, were supposed to be factories for producing gentlemen, leaders, and loyal subjects. Instead, they have become incubators of entitled brutes. The praise for safety protocols is a red herring. It is a way for the British establishment to pat itself on the back while avoiding the uncomfortable truth: their educational model is failing. It is producing students who are proficient in exams but destitute of character.
This is not an isolated incident. It is a pattern echoing the decline of Roman education in the late Empire, when rhetorical flourish replaced moral substance. Just as Rome’s schools produced lawyers and philosophers but not citizens, so too do these modern institutions produce machines of ambition without conscience. We are raising a generation that knows how to succeed but not how to live.
What is to be done? First, stop fetishising British standards. The problem is not a lack of protocols but a surplus of hypocrisy. The British elite, who send their own children to schools with pastoral care and robust oversight, export a cut-rate version of their own system to the former colonies. Second, we must recognise that safety protocols are not a substitute for authority. The headmaster who hides behind a handbook is no headmaster at all. Authority must be personal, not procedural. It must be the moral authority of a teacher who commands respect, not mere compliance.
Kenya, like much of the world, is grappling with a crisis of identity. It is stuck between a pre-colonial past it cannot reclaim and a post-colonial future it cannot imagine. The British school model is a crutch, but a broken one. The solution is not more British committees but a reimagining of education rooted in local traditions of moral instruction. Let us stop pretending that a curriculum designed for the children of empire is suitable for the children of a sovereign nation.
This murder is a tragedy, but it is also a signal. It is a signal that the era of colonial educational mimicry must end. The praise for safety protocols is a joke. It is an applause for a bandage on a haemorrhage. We must look deeper, we must think harder, and we must have the courage to abandon old models that no longer serve. Otherwise, we will continue to produce students who can pass tests but cannot pass the test of humanity.
