Building a Bridge: The Problematization of Urban Youth in Kenya and the Limits of Fee-Based Education Reform

• In Event: Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: The Micro and Macro Politics and Practices of Neoliberalism and Schooling

Abstract

This paper explores the limits of reform in the education of ‘urban youth’ in Kenya from a historical perspective. I take as a point of departure the recent appearance and rapid growth of Bridge International Academies, a for-profit venture in present-day Kenya, in order to explore how the contemporary ‘crisis’ of today’s urban youth is localized in these youths’ academic and character deficits.

Bridge’s appearance is linked with the ‘failure’ of African states to provide adequate educational opportunities, requiring intervention of Western social entrepreneurs to ‘bridge’ an imagined gap separating students from a global knowledge economy (Ball, 2012). The effort to bridge this gap and provide “knowledge for all’ is interrogated in the ways it seeks to remap Kenyan identities as globally engaged citizens in ways that produce new categories of social exclusion.

My analysis draws upon Foucault’s (2003) notion of the problematization. The construction of ‘urban youth’ as the problem is treated as constitutive of the conditions in which possible responses can be given, as well as the elements that constitute what the solutions attempt to respond to. Following Popkewitz (2008), I argue that conceptions of urban youth are also guided by particular hopes and fears. Schooling is treated as an intervention in managing the potential dangers of urban youth by transforming them into the kinds of people ready to participate in an imagined global society.

The method of the inquiry is a discursive and historiographical analysis of conceptualizations of urban youth dating back to the colonial period. I seek discursive patterns that express qualities urban youth embody, that demonstrate hopes and fears of who they ‘are’ and who they ‘should be.’ I analyze various texts produced by Bridge Academy and published on its website, along with interviews, personal correspondence, and curricular materials gathered in an organizational ‘case study’ by the Harvard Business School in May, 2013.

Fee-based schooling options, such as Bridge Academies, ‘make sense’ based upon a hope is that education can transform youth in order to ‘lead’ their endangered community to ‘a better place’ (the global knowledge economy of the future). Yet education’s role in youth’s ‘proper’ development is bound to political and economic imperatives of the early 20th century that normalized youth in ways that were gendered, raced, and classed.

The problematization of urban youth have historically produced inclusions and exclusions of various ‘kinds.’ The construction and play of such differences is what animates development efforts that recognize the urban youth for inclusion in terms of the qualities in need of transformation. The hope is for a ‘better world;’ the danger is how this hope remains tethered to exclusions that mark differences as deficiencies to be corrected.

References
Ball, S. J. (2012) Global Education Inc. London: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (2003). “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault.” In The Essential Foucault, edited by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose. New York: The New Press. pp. 18–24.
Popkewitz, T. S. (2008). Cosmpolitanism and the Age of School Reform. New York: Routledge.

Author

• Christopher Mark Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin-Madison