Education

27Oct09

Even though education is tied with “hot” for first place in the Things-I-Think-About-Most  competition, I realized that I have yet to write almost anything here about it here. For those of you rushing off to a power lunch or power nap, I’ll summarize: everything is a mess.

If only it were that simple.

There is a group of about a half-dozen girls, some from Kati, others boarders from various tiny villages, who live in my compound. Most nights, they have some kind of devoir a domicile (heaven forbid you should confuse this with an unembellished devoir, an in-class quiz) or lecon which they “take”. This act of lecon-ta, as it has been dubbed in Bambara, entails sitting down with the notebook in which you copied, in French you don’t understand (more on that later), a page of information, and memorizing word-for-word the physical properties of North America or a ridiculously summarized history of neolithic Mali. I asked Djeneba (Alice), the girl whose summer trips to the U.S. have given her impressive control over English, what she thinks studying means, and her answer was “memorizing.”  Now it might be a little difficult to describe exactly what most american students intuitively (or maybe after much guiding…) consider studying, but you might expect that their definition would include some mention of reading or practicing or reviewing etc.  But how can you blame them for “taking” their information by heart when even the slightest deviation from the teachers’ definition on a test means an automatic zero? Then, however, you come to realize that the teachers themselves are just doing their best to re-create the classroom from which they rose, a style of education whose very name, classique, hardly suggests innovation or creativity. This is where the problem starts.

There seem to be two main issues colliding at the Ciwara school. First, the problem of language. Back in 2000, the Malian government passed a law saying that all schools had to switch to pedagogie convergante which meant that schools were no longer allowed to teach only in french, but rather had to start kids out in their native language. Arguments for this switch included the preservation of local tongues and the idea is that students learn foundational material better when it’s taught in their first language. You might wonder why the children of an independent state need to learn colonial french at all, but the truth is that any job outside the most menial village employment (or unemployment as is the case for many) requires pretty decent French. Here in Kati, the switch is happening in the prescribed fashion (all Bambara for about the first three years, then a fairly quick switch over the course of three years into only French) but the problem is that it is not happening effectively. This has very wide-ranging consequences.

Pick any subject and chances are that a typical class will consist mostly of students copying definitions and examples from the board into their cahiers. They then go home, “take” the lesson and return to class where their well-trained memories regurgitate exactly what the teacher wants to hear. This is where we run into the second problem, the imported idea of student-centered learning. Though American kids would try to convince you otherwise, their educational system focuses almost more on them than on the curriculum. In almost every school, teachers are taught to work with their students and help them discover the answers rather than forcing definitions down their throats. The end result is an educated, creative student who has the tools to learn on her own. The problem here has to do with the fact that all of the teachers were educated under classique and thus have a hard time even imagining a philosophy that doesn’t give them the power to simply copy out of the book onto the board and then go home for lunch. So now it seems like one should just be able to retrain Malian teachers to work more constructively with their students (which is a whole new topic), but it’s right about now that you realize the problem isn’t only with the teachers.

Imagine trying to lead a class discussion or have your students write a personal response when they a) can barely understand you and b) don’t have the language skills to either speak or write in French. Since the junior high level is supposed to conducted entirely in French, the teachers really have no option other than having the students copy simply because none of the people in front of them can express themselves in the required language. Unfortunately, this means that very little real information enters the students’ brains yet the comprehension checks (essentially “Did you understand that?”) can be answered to satisfaction(“oui monsieur “) with no strings (think: “Okay then, give me an example”) attached.

Another problem is the intense pressure to keep up with the prescribed curriculum. The education that the government mandates is in preparation for two major tests (after 6th grade and after 9th) which determine one’s eligibility to continue schooling. Those the exams are apparently rife with cheating and indeed corruption (proctors often write the answers on the board, thus testing only transposition skills, which most students are surprisingly good at), their role as gateways to continuing education makes them a vital goal to work toward. An aside: a major problem with the examinations in a country that relies on manual labor is that parents often use their child’s poor performance as an excuse to pull him (and especially her) out of school and put them to work for the family.

So it seems like the problem needs to be attacked from multiple directions. First, the kids need to successfully transition from their native language into French, thus allowing them to understand what’s going on at school. Second, the teachers need to encourage their students and force them to think creatively and independently (skills that ideally in the future would help Mali develop from the inside out). And third, if not last, administrators and ministers need to push all this forward and keep track of what all the 9,000 Malian schools are doing.

If only it were that simple.

More about various small adventures later…

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