There are stories that make you angry, stories that make you sad, and then there are stories that leave you staring at the wall wondering whether society accidentally skipped a software update somewhere along the way.
The tragedy at Utumishi Girls Academy in Kenya falls firmly into that category.
In the early hours of May 28, a dormitory fire claimed the lives of 16 schoolgirls and left dozens injured. As details emerged, the nation moved from grief to disbelief after investigations suggested the fire may have been deliberately started by fellow students. Not strangers. Not criminals who broke into the school. Fellow students. Human beings who shared classrooms, meals, gossip, exams, and probably each other’s snacks.
Naturally, there are many conversations taking place around school safety, mental health, counselling, and boarding school culture. All of those discussions matter. No single factor can explain an act of such devastating violence. Human behaviour is shaped by family, peers, schools, communities, and personal experiences. Yet before we appoint expert panels and create task forces with impressive acronyms, perhaps we should revisit an old saying our grandparents loved: charity starts at home.
Somewhere along the way, modern parenting began to resemble a customer-care relationship. Some parents know the battery percentage of their child’s phone but have absolutely no idea what is happening inside their child’s mind. They know which TikTok dances the child likes, what sneakers they want for Christmas, and which streaming services they subscribe to, but could not tell you how that child handles anger, disappointment, rejection, or conflict.
We have become specialists in providing things and amateurs at raising people.
Every generation blames schools for everything. The school should discipline them. The school should teach values. The school should teach respect. The school should teach responsibility. At this rate, schools will soon be expected to teach children how to chew food and remember their relatives’ birthdays.
Yet children do not arrive at boarding school as blank sheets of paper. They arrive carrying lessons, attitudes, habits, and examples absorbed at home over many years. Long before a child enters a classroom, someone has already been teaching them how to treat others, how to respond to frustration, and how to navigate disappointment.
That is what makes this tragedy so disturbing.
Setting a dormitory on fire is not a normal reaction to frustration. It is not ordinary teenage rebellion. It is not simply kids being kids. Nobody accidentally wakes up and decides that arson is a reasonable response to a timetable, a school rule, or a personal grievance. Such actions point to deeper failures that deserve serious examination.
Of course, schools also deserve scrutiny. Across East Africa, some boarding schools have become masters of conducting assemblies about discipline while overlooking important details such as emergency exits, functioning fire alarms, extinguishers, and regular safety drills. Every few years another tragedy occurs, another commission is formed, another report is written, and somehow we find ourselves back at the same funeral.
We are exceptionally good at investigating disasters and remarkably poor at preventing them.
Still, parents cannot outsource character development.
You can outsource mathematics. You can outsource chemistry. You can outsource football coaching. You cannot outsource values.
The first classroom is still the home. The first teachers are still parents. The first lessons about empathy, responsibility, accountability, consequences, and humanity are supposed to happen long before a child ever steps into a dormitory.
As Kenya mourns the young lives lost, there will be investigations, court cases, policy reviews, and public debates. All of that matters. But perhaps the most important question is the one nobody enjoys asking:
What are our children learning when nobody is watching?
Because while we often ask what schools are teaching our children, perhaps it is time we also ask what children are learning from us. If the first classroom is the home, then every society must eventually confront the lessons being taught there.
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