Education

As for the potter he had lived long enough to know that the best way of killing a rose is to force it open when it is still only the promise of a bud. –Jose Saramago, The Cave

I am struggling with accepting the education system here: not that it’s not good, it is, but that’s the primary problem. It’s good for me, but I’m a white woman, from Western Society, with resources. I get it because I have always gotten it. I was born into this system, lived it, learned it, know it. But, to be African, growing up in an era of apartheid, it is vague and obscure. It’s completely alien. In fact, it is foreign: it was written by Europeans.

Imagine the following scenario: You have a job and you’ve always had the same job. In fact, you’ve been doing it exactly the same way for the last ten years. Unfortunately, some people from a distant country have decided that everything about your job: your performance, your routine, your structure; is absolutely wrong. They come in, give you a few workshops and walk away patting themselves on the back for “saving you.” Meanwhile you feel confused and overwhelmed. When you attempt to do your job now, things continuously fall apart, yet there’s no one there to pick up the pieces.

This is the fallacy of the West. This idea that we can save third world countries with everyone’s ideals except for the country in question:

I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means except by getting off his back. –Leo Tolstoy

So, I sit here, attempting to sweep up this mess of quality, but unfortunately oblivious, intentions. This education system is now trying to produce clones of suburban American children. Yet, these children do not fit the description; they are African children who are struggling and impoverished. They are the forgotten ones. By adopting Western standards we continuously make the rural areas messier while effectively increasing their gap with the city-folk, the better off. Unwittingly we have boosted the established further ahead while ignorantly forcing a greater cache of poverty to persist.

What is the solution? We need to get back to the basics. I don’t suggest scrapping the entire education system, but, for now, abandon the obscure. We can’t ask teachers to have a learner-centered classroom without first addressing the issue of getting teachers to stay in the classroom for a full day. We can’t expect integration across subjects when teachers are struggling to comprehend the curriculum in general. We can’t ask for individualized instruction when there are no disability services, and teachers have had no training for working with children with disabilities. We need to address underlying problems instead of ignoring them:

I’d like our children to have skills that help them to survive: that’s the long and short of it. –Emerging Voices: A Report on Education in South African Rural Communities

We can’t force these schools to become mirrors of idealism: there are too few classrooms, too few resources, too few well-trained teachers. They aren’t ready to assess students individually when there are 75 first graders in a classroom, or to perform science experiments when there aren’t enough chairs for all of the children. Once again the West has done a really quality of job with distributing beautiful theory to Africa. It’s simply unfortunate that it causes a lot of uncertainty.