I meet my partner teacher in the staff room (a room about
20x30 with school desks around the perimeter for each teacher, a large table in
the center of the room and a TV- yes- and it is on all the time- I sit and
watch him copy notes from the text he is using for East African History-
literally word for word with only some additions of his own. We then walk
across the courtyard (the big grassy/dirt area) to the classroom where the seventy-six
Senior 1 boys are waiting for us. You see in Uganda, the teachers do not have a
classroom that the students come to, the student stay in the classroom and wait
for a teacher to come- sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t- but the boys
stay just the same. They stay in one big
room, rows of benches with maybe eight inches of writing surface attached and
they sit three to a desk. All have notebooks of varying sizes and styles, and
blue pens. My partner teacher brings a chair for me to sit in and then proceeds
to dictate the lesson to the boys, occasionally writing whole paragraphs on the
blackboard (and by that I mean the concrete which extends out from the wall by
about a ¼ inch and is painted black), with chalk- yes chalk. When I say
dictate- I mean saying each sentence or part sentence over and over four or five
times while the boys write furiously in their notebooks. This goes on for either
forty or eighty minutes. Then another teacher arrives (or not) and we head back
to the staff room to wait for the next class that he teaches. My teacher has
three sections of Senior 1 (basically 7th grade, but the boys can be anywhere
from 11-16ish) and three sections of Senior 4 (that would be 10th grade or age 15ish to 18ish). He meets
each sections three times during the week for 40 minutes- sometimes the blocks
are back to back, making an 80 minute class.
The reason for the age range is that some boys either
missed some years of school because they were abducted by the LRA and became
child soldiers, or were in some other way affected by the war, or they could
not pay the fees to attend; so they missed school until they could pay again.
There is no free school in Uganda- all the government schools cost, the
boarding ones, like cost more-as the parents have to supplement the food. The
government pays about 15cents per student per day for food. For girls, missing
school once a month because they do not have sanitary pads is common. This puts
them behind, if they get far enough behind, they quit or are forced to quit
because their parents will not pay if they do not perform.
It is interesting to be a teacher in the era of
globalization. In many respects we do live in a global village. We all eat,
sleep, love, learn, have families, listen to music, enjoy friends, work, play,
and try to get through each day the best we can. In other ways, we live very
different lives. This was most recently brought to my attention because my
eighteen year old daughter, who is spending the year in Senegal, just came face
to face with the kind of violence, that while not uncommon in America- is
condemned- but in Senegal is culturally accepted. Her host mom beat her
host sister so violently that the daughter lost some of her hair and had a
broom broken over her head; all because she had not cooked Emma’s dinner.
There are many cultures that accept violence towards each other as normal. As a
visiting teacher in Uganda, I had to stand by while children were caned. You
might wonder why I stood by, why could I not just step in front of the teacher
with the cane and stop them. As teachers in America we are federally mandated
to report suspected child abuse. It is our job to help kids, not just to learn,
but to show them how important each and every one of them is, what their
potential is, and to believe in them - sometimes when no one else does. Charles
Leadbeater said, “Your vantage point determines everything you see.” This is
extremely important to remember when considering comparative education.
Where we come from, our own cultural norms, biases, and
experiences will influence how we interpret the data. Comparing educational
models and outcomes is not just about statistics, it is about real people who
live very different lives, in cultures we may or may not understand. Our
definitions of education may also vary and I agree that expanding the
definition to include non-traditional elements is vitally important. Education
must be made relevant to the users and include traditional, non-traditional,
public, private, teachers, students and families. Having an overreaching goal
of education for all, or lifelong education are the big umbrellas under which
we can compare educational models. But such a comparison needs to account for
the many cultural, environmental, and resource differentials that exist
globally.
Education is not a miracle cure as has been pointed out by
a number of authors and studies. Pouring
more money into a broken system, a new idea, or technology for the sake of
technology is not an efficient use of our resources. “It is not enough simply
to get the technical details right; reforms must also navigate the challenges
of the nation’s political economy” (World Bank). Our best resource as teachers is each other.
Supporting each other, learning from and teaching each other, providing
resources for each other and most of all trying to understand the unique issues
we all face and not apply the West is best attitude to education in the
developing world. I may not agree with the cultural norm in another culture, and it may be right to change it, but I do have to respect the cultural norm in that country. What I did in the caning situation was to have a discussion
with the teachers about why they cane, why they cane even though it is now
illegal in Uganda to do so, and what other methods/punishment might yield the
same results. I learned from them, they learned from me.
Change does not happen because we wish it, or pray for it, or donate a room full of computers to a school with no electricity. Change happens because we set an example, we educate, and we work within the cultural norms to make a personal connection with other human beings on the planet in the hope that we can learn from each other
.
