Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Sternberg

Sternberg is aiming a quiet grenade at a familiar Western assumption: that schooling is self-evidently valuable because it leads to college, credentials, and mobility. By attributing to “Kenyan families” the view that “school doesn’t really matter,” he reframes education as an economic calculation, not a moral one. If the payoff structure is broken - if college is statistically out of reach and dropout is the norm - then treating formal schooling as the center of childhood can look less like aspiration and more like misplaced faith.

The subtext is classic Sternberg: intelligence and competence are local, practical, and culturally judged. The line “learning things that are important to them” pushes against the idea that leaving school equals intellectual failure. It suggests an alternative curriculum, one that may be better aligned with immediate survival, work, caregiving, or community roles than with abstract tests. The quote’s rhetorical move is to make “important” slippery: important to whom, and by what standards?

Context matters, because the phrasing also risks flattening Kenya into a single educational destiny. “Almost all” is a blunt instrument; it can sound like sociological certainty when it’s really an argument about structural inequality and the mismatch between imported schooling models and lived realities. Read charitably, Sternberg is critiquing systems that demand students invest in futures they’re not permitted to access, then blaming them for rational disengagement. Read uncharitably, it can echo a deficit narrative if the “important” learning is left vague, unmeasured, and thus easy to dismiss.