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Struggle to educate Malawi's children; United Nations' Millennium Goals are admirable but free schooling shows mixed results
In Niall Dorey's second grade classroom, 12 students sit enraptured listening to the story of pushy Pinkerton pig, who encounters a Sand Witch that teaches him the value of sometimes coming in second. When Dorey teaches them the conjunctive "but" - "Pinkerton went to the beach but he did not enjoy it" - a dozen hands wave in the air, each student wanting to read aloud a sentence inscribed in colourful chalk on the blackboard. Around the board chugs a homemade "birthday train," fraction graphs snake around the door, there are word boards pinned up around the windows. One must travel across this small northern town to Constance Kamwendo's second grade class at the government-funded Katoto primary school to understand how extraordinary this scene is. There, 93 children sit on the concrete floor, in sweaters and winter jackets to fight Mzuzu's notoriously cold, damp weather. With their pencils worn down to nubs and bottlecaps spread around them, they work out four math sums printed on the board. Astonishingly, the children, who range in age from 6 to 9, are nearly silent as they tackle their assignment. As they finish, they simply raise their books in the air and wait for Kamwendo to come around with her red pen. There is no time to explain why the answer is wrong. There are already four or five books waving in the air. "When a child cannot concentrate and has problems, (the teacher) cannot concentrate on each of the 90 (students)," headmaster S.N. Mwendo says. "Instead of giving a good number of exercises, there are just a few that are manageable to be marked within that time." This is free primary education, one of the Millennium Development Goals that dozens of developing countries are under pressure to implement by 2015. Twelve years after becoming the first sub-Saharan African country to abolish the tuition fees that kept thousands of kids out of school, Malawi is still struggling to provide quality education amidst overcrowded classrooms and a severe shortage of qualified teachers. Malawi's experience proves that merely implementing the free primary education Millennium Goal doesn't always solve problems, and in fact, sometimes creates problems of its own. The Millennium Goals, ranging from improving child health to eradicating poverty and hunger, are UN-backed priorities for developing countries looking for debt relief and foreign aid. Free universal, primary education is one of the goals because it's a way to get children into the classroom where they can learn to the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic - which studies have shown can influence everything from the number of children a woman has to the way a country's economy performs. Since making education free 12 years ago, literacy in Malawi has seen little improvement, moving to just over 60 per cent from 58 per cent, proving that either children are not attending (school is free, but not mandatory) or not learning while they're there. The average government-funded classroom in Malawi features one teacher facing 80 students. Most teachers, trained sometimes for as little as two weeks, earn about $100 a month. Hundreds of private schools have popped up in recent years to fill the education gap, but most are simply businesses, with profits from tuition fees going to the owners' pocket rather than back into the bare classrooms. "They're cramming them in, getting bums in the seats. They're taking money and not putting any money back into it," says Dorey, who charges more than $50 a year to attend his Beehive school. Education in Malawi is stuck in a time warp, he notes. As in most African schools, the children sit in rows on benches, the teacher stands in front of the blackboard with a cane and teaches by rote. If there are textbooks, they are hopelessly out of date. The lessons are written on the blackboard, then transcribed into school books. There is no room for discussion, no emphasis on analysis. There is simply memorization and regurgitation. "They write on the board, the children copy it. There's no interaction, no thinking for themselves," says Dorey, who is Scottish. Three years ago, Dorey came as a volunteer teacher to one of the top-rated private schools in Malawi, a thin splinter of a country running alongside Zambia and Mozambique, whose poverty routinely places it in the bottom 10 of the UN's Human Development Index. Dorey was shocked by what he found. There were not enough seats for the children, so they sat on the floor. The library was a mouldy mess of misused books. There was not a shred of colour in the classrooms, not even an alphabet chart. "Private education in Malawi is run more like a business. The directors are more interested in having money than a quality education," says Bravius Chapera, who works with a Montreal-based education trust that pays school fees for children in need. Relying mostly on donations and grants, Dorey has filled his Beehive private school with globes, musical instruments, counting machines, hexagonal desks and storybooks. He hires mostly untrained teachers who have not learned the Malawi method of teaching by dictation and gives them on-the-job training in how to engage students in their lessons. "I want to show people what a bloody good school can be here, because I've yet to see one," he says. "The state of government schools is dire," he adds, saying that his adopted daughter attended five government schools in the span of two years, including one where she simply sat under a tree, without so much as a blackboard. "Anyone with enough money pays for private school because the alternative is bad. Depressingly bad," he says. For now, the goal of free education extends only to primary school, meaning every Malawian who passes the exams to continue to secondary school must pay, even at government schools. Pupils pay $20 per term to attend the private Mzuzu Secondary School, but in one of two classrooms, 127 students sit squashed two to a desk in front of an empty blackboard without a teacher. It's pouring rain and he is sitting in the wooden shack that doubles as a teachers' lounge, marking papers with a charcoal fire at his feet. "We're not learning anything!" one student shouts in frustration when asked what subject they're supposed to be learning. "If you look at education from a business point of view, you only look at enrolment. The government schools can provide a better education than some of the private schools that are just out to make money," Chapera says. Each term, the owners collect more than $8,000 in fees from students and head teacher Paul Ndolo insists the owners are reinvesting the money although there are no textbooks and the school provides neither notebooks nor pencils, they are expanding the two- room school by building a third classroom and recently installed an outdoor tap for water. Across a grassy field, students pay double the fees to attend "Our Time" secondary school, where classes have from 25 to 50 students. "I think communication with our pupils becomes more personal, whereas if we have a large pool of pupils, it's difficult to reach everyone," says head master Moses Phiri Hunnis. "Marking exercises for larger classes is pathetic," he adds. The problem with a lower enrolment, however, is that the school can ill afford new equipment, like chemicals for chemistry class or new books for the library. Although education is coveted for its ability to help a person out of poverty and into a paid job, the result of poor primary and secondary education becomes obvious at the college and university level. "The quality I expect is not there," says Peter Mwanza, vice chancellor at the Mzuzu University. "We have to work hard to bring them to the level we expect and take them to the level we expect them to reach." He feels the free primary education scheme suffered from nearly a decade of corruption and neglect. "There should have been many, many good primary schools built, but instead it was plundered and went straight into peoples' pockets," Mwanza says. "We still have a lot to do to make it efficient and effective." Dorey says he's convinced that Malawian schools could achieve so much more with their meagre resources if teachers and administrators simply cared enough to pour more energy into educating their students. "For a school to run efficiently and for children to learn, the child needs to feel safe and secure and loved and confident to ask questions. There has to be that level of care," Dorey says. "People know that education is there for a reason. It is valued with the ultimate objective of getting a good job, of getting money to get out of the trap. People are dying to get out and break that cycle." Karen Palmer is a Toronto Star correspondent based in Africa. Email life @ thestar.ca. Credit: Special to the Star |