Prince Phillip’s Words and their Electrifying Effect.

**Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh with Queen Elizabeth II and their children in this 1951 photo.** *Pic courtesy of Politico.*

“My generation, although reasonably well-schooled, is probably the worst educated of this age,” are remarks made be the late Duke of Edinburgh; prince Phillip. The prince died last week aged 99 years in the UK. He died a ‘royal’ death.

He had lived in royalty for over half a decade as the husband of Queen Elizabeth II. I am reminded every day that there are still opportunities for those who want to be associated with royalty in this earth from the Duke’s story. For fact, ending up in royalty unless one is born into it is very grim unless he/she works it out.

Prince Phillip’s footsteps can help a lot. He became fully royal by marrying into royalty. In reading stories about the late prince last week, I was left baffled. A number of writers remarked how the prince sometimes somehow forgot he was royalty and took humor too far.

It shouldn’t be an issue given the fact that we understand the saying that even if you domesticated a monkey, you cannot remove the behavior of it jumping on trees. How we have been brought up stays with us for as long as we can irrespective of where we end up finding ourselves in life.

So don’t be surprised to see a very rich man behave in unexpected ways. It could be that their childhood or rather upbringing is the reason. Irrespective of what people said of the prince, at least he made some statements that will instill in us reason.

When I read the introductory statement of our today’s writing, I was wondering what made the prince say such words of a generation that we have often thought to have had all morals right. If he had meant my generation, that somehow could make sense.

I remember a statement made by Joshua Oigara in 2016 about a bizarre statement made by a certain young man he had met. This was a third-year student I suppose at the Jomo Kenyatta university who told him that once he was out of campus, he wanted to get a job and start earning a million shillings in salary a month. No experience, nothing at all except for an ego and a need for instant gratification.

Even if it meant going out of the ordinary and building a mini unicorn, at least it needs time before things can measure up. I could be wrong but I believe such an idea was well too far fetched.

I am forced to believe that the prince looked at levels of expectation that were being set for this generation with all that we know due to advanced technology and on realizing how we had terribly under-measured, he was left with no choice but to make the statement. Let us dissect it now.

This is a generation that is reasonably well schooled. In other words, a majority of the people have gone to school which means they are supposed to be better people. Among the objectives of going to school is to develop a sense of self awareness and self-confidence. Additionally, have a high level of self-discipline and increased self-esteem.

As though that is not enough, we are expected to be sensitive to others, be able to cooperate well with others and develop acceptable behavior. An assessment of all these, and we are found not to have measured up means something could be wrong.

In the words of my father, it means that school went through us and not us going through school. This is the reason the statement goes ahead to give us due diligence that yes, we went to school and probably did well thus becoming educated but that became a curse instead of a blessing as we became a worse people.

In the village, there was an interesting philosophy back when I was growing up. If you were a poor performer, the thing was to get a transfer to another school that was performing well. It was expected that in that school you would perform better.

To horror of horrors, most of the poor performers still continued to perform poorly. Yet the best thing to have been done was to find the strengths of this student maybe in terms of skill and develop them in that line. So, it was expected that now that we have a more educated people, we could have had a better world. Well, that is not case.

Interestingly, it is the time when we have higher levels of corruption, murders, organized crime in form of physical and also cyber-crime. Suicide levels are on the highest, heightened levels of instant gratification are on the peak today than ever before. In other words, our social morass it seems is getting worse than initially anticipated.

So, prince Phillip said this statement maybe to mean of a people in the UK, his home country. But looking closely and we can agree that the same can be said of a people all around the globe. In fact the words squarely dissect our country Kenya. No wonder we hear the words of, ‘them, our days back in the age.’

It is high time we took a step back, most probably, and considered where our way marks were. There we can locate the right direction and follow it. In as much as I may say of these, things are not expected to be any better, rather we should brace ourselves for a more schooled and educated generation but the worst of all ages.

Truly, we are reasonably well-schooled, and probably the worst educated of this age.

End