Effect of Public Secondary Schools Categorisation on Students’ Commitment to Democratic Values

Nurturing students who cherish commitment to democratic values remains to be one of fundamental desires on the perpetuation of democracy in Kenya since independence. In pursuit for this desire, the categorisation of public secondary schools have remained to be a cardinal instrument toward realisation of this democratic goal. This study was designed to explore the potential of various categories of public secondary schools in influencing students’ commitment to democratic values in Kiambu County, Kenya. In so doing the study sort to find whether there were significant differences in commitment to democratic values between students attending; National schools, Extra-County schools, County schools and Sub-County schools. The study was carried out among public secondary schools in Kiambu County, Kenya. A total of 384 students were involved drawn from target population of 28,213 Form IV students using stratified proportionate random sampling procedure. The study results revealed that, there were statistical significant differences in commitments to democratic values among students attending; National schools, Extra-County schools, County schools and Sub-County schools at F (3, 339) = 16.73, p =0.001, p < 0.05 with Tukey’s test indicating National schools were significantly different from other three categories of public secondary schools (which did not have significant difference among them).Multiple regression on categorisation of schools yielded a significant regression equation (F (4, 338) = 12.790 p<0.001) with R² of 0.131.Thus, confirming that, there were variations in influence of different categories of public secondary schools on students’ commitment to democratic values.