The Paper and the Person

Dear Panel,

The folder in front of you is thicker than the person it describes. You asked for certified copies of academic and professional certificates, and you got them: the KCSE certificate, the degree, the diploma, the professional papers. You also asked, as public employers in Kenya now routinely do, for proof of character, and you got that too, from five offices. The police certify that the applicant has no criminal record. The Kenya Revenue Authority certifies that his taxes are paid. The Higher Education Loans Board certifies that his student loan is in order. A credit reference bureau certifies that he pays his debts, and the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission is asked whether it knows anything against him. Chapter Six of the Constitution, which is about leadership and integrity, has become, at your end of the process, a list of attachments.

I want to make your case before I question it, because it is a good one. You do not know this applicant. You have forty minutes and a stack of other folders. Paper is what strangers have instead of trust. It is also what the poor have instead of connections. For most of this country’s history the surest way into a good job was to be somebody’s nephew, and the certificate was the one thing a child from a village school could put on the table that an uncle in the ministry could not outrank. A system that reads paper is at least reading something other than surnames.

Economics has a respectable version of your position. In 1973 Michael Spence argued, in a paper that later helped win him a Nobel Prize, that education can be valuable to an employer even if it adds nothing to anyone’s productivity. If able people find it easier to earn a credential than less able people do, the credential sorts them, whatever was or was not learned on the way. On that view you are not wrong to ask for the paper. You are only wrong if you think you know what it says.

Here is what you have asked it to say. The certificate was meant to mark that someone had learned something. You have asked it to stand in for the learning itself, then for ability, then for discipline, and lately, through the five clearances, for honesty. Each time you lean on it harder, it bends.

The economist Charles Goodhart noticed the bending in another field. Writing about monetary policy in 1975, he observed that “any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.” The anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, writing about audit in British universities in 1997, put the idea in the form most people now quote: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” A grade is a measure of learning. The moment a grade decides who gets a university place, a job and a life, it becomes a target, and people aim at it, with revision, with tuition, with the rented exam paper and the obliging invigilator.

You have seen how far it can bend. In 2015, 2,636 candidates scored a straight A in the KCSE. In 2016 the number was 141. Announcing the results, the Education Cabinet Secretary, Fred Matiang’i, said strict marking rules had been applied and that this time there had been “no cheating and monkey business.” Many of the 2015 A’s were honestly earned. Nobody can now tell which ones from the paper, and those certificates are still in folders like the one in front of you, certified, stamped, and saying exactly what they said the day they were printed. The paper did not change between 2015 and 2016. What it measured did.

The sociologist Randall Collins went further, in The Credential Society (1979). Looking at American employers, he argued that rising educational requirements had less to do with the technical demands of jobs than with status: credentials closed occupations to outsiders and sorted people into ranks, while most of the skills a job needed were learned at work, not at school. If he is even half right, then every time you raise the qualification for a post you are not buying more skill. You are raising the price of the ticket.

The damage is not only at your end of the table. Ivan Illich, in Deschooling Society (1971), said the pupil is “schooled” to confuse “teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.” The applicant believes his folder too. He has spent two decades being told that the paper is the thing, and he has organised his learning around it: what will be examined, what will be certified, what will look well in the folder. What was never going to be examined, he left alone.

I can offer one case from the inside. For most of Forms One to Three my report forms gave me a mean grade of E. In the last year I began studying at night, and the final certificate, the only school document anyone has ever asked to see, records A’s in Mathematics and Biology. It is a true certificate. It is silent about the three years of E’s and about the nights, which is where most of what I still use was learned: how to begin again on a subject I had already failed. No panel has asked about that, and the certificate gives no hint that there is anything to ask.

Michael Sandel, in The Tyranny of Merit (2020), titled a chapter “Credentialism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice.” His concern is the people on the other side of your table: those without the paper, who are told in a hundred polite ways that the lack is their own fault. The fundi who keeps your car running has no certificate in motor mechanics. If he applied to maintain the ministry’s fleet, his folder would be thin, and you would be obliged by your own rules to prefer a thicker one.

So the tempting conclusion is to say: stop reading paper, look at the person. I do not think you should, and not only because the regulations will not let you. Abandon the paper and you return to the uncle in the ministry, the reference from a cousin, the panel that hires the candidate who reminds it of itself. The child from the village school loses the one document that spoke for him when nobody else would. The fundi’s skill is real; so, sometimes, is the confidence of a man who has no skill at all, and without paper you cannot easily tell them apart.

What the paper needs is less weight, and a reader who knows what it can carry. A certificate can tell you that someone sat an exam under certain conditions on a certain date and passed. It cannot tell you what they would do on your worst day. Five clearances can tell you what a man has paid and that he has not been caught. They cannot tell you whether he would refuse the envelope. For that you would have to give him something to do in front of you, or ask someone who has watched him work, and both take longer than forty minutes.

At the foot of every page in the folder is a rubber stamp from a commissioner for oaths, certifying that the copy is a true copy of the original. It is the most honest document in the pile. It claims exactly what it checked, and nothing else.