D+C Development and Cooperation (No. 3, May/June 2001, p. 4 - 5)

When education ministers from around the world met in Jomtien in 1990, they set themselves the goal to achieve Education for All by the year 2000. Now that the target year has come and gone, we have to realise that we are still far from that noble goal. Especially in Africa, the reality is sobering, as the following article shows.

Amina is ten years old and lives on a commercial farm in Zimbabwe. Due to years of neglect, both by farm proprietors and government, an estimated 2 million farm-workers and their families have been deprived of a range of social services, including education.

The nearest school to Amina is over 12 kilometres away. She wakes up in the morning at around 4.30 a.m. and “runs to school to get there on time.” When she arrives she is often tired, too tired to be able to concentrate.

Sometimes she falls asleep in class, earning her a stern rebuke from a teacher who has to cope with fifty other pupils. Amina returns home late in the afternoon, where family duties demand that she collects fuelwood and water, helps prepare the evening meal and looks after the smaller children. She has no time to carry out the homework her teacher has set her. She is worried that the next day will punish her for being lazy and uninterested in her education. At times she thinks it better not to go to school at all, and sums up her problems in the following words:

“Very few people understand our difficulties. Some of us walk long distances to school, and when we arrive late the teachers don’t forgive us. We are beaten or severely punished. Many of us who have to walk over ten kilometres leave home early and travel on an empty stomach and spend the whole day without eating. Sometimes we reach home by about 7 o’clock. We cannot do any homework because we will be tired. Sometimes I think it is no use going to school any more.”

Ten years after Jomtien

In response to problems like these, many world leaders committed themselves ten years ago to achieving universal access to good quality primary education by the year 2000. The World Conference On Education For All in Jomtien, Thailand, was heralded at the time as a major step in promoting full school enrolment and solving the problem of access to basic education for a large section of the world’s children. While some progress has been made in some parts of the globe, however, it is clear today that these targets were widely optimistic. Today it is estimated that some 125 million children of primary school age are receiving no education at all. Most of them are girls. Within the first few years of primary school, another 150 million children also drop out.

The situation is most worrying in sub-Saharan Africa, including countries like Zimbabwe, where a decrease in percentage enrolment figures has been witnessed in recent years. One report painted the following bleak picture,
“The full extent of the threat now facing sub-Saharan Africa is not widely appreciated. Since 1990 a group of 16 countries in Africa, accounting for half of all 6 - 11 year olds, have suffered a decline in net enrolment rates. In the absence of a dramatically improved level of education coverage, the foundations of sub-Saharan Africa’s recovery in the next century will be non-existent and the region will become increasingly marginalized.” (Education Now, Oxfam, Oxford, 1999)

Faced with these statistics many governments have recommitted themselves to achieving the targets set in 1990. The time scale has changed, however, and has now shifted to 2015 when the aim is to achieve universal primary education and an end to gender inequality in school enrolment figures.

Quality not quantity

Welcome as these commitments might be, however, children such as Amina, as well as her parents, have another challenge that they would like to pose to educational authorities in their country. It is not only the long walk to the nearest school that Amina complains about, the hunger when she arrives, the fact that she is too tired to concentrate on the lesson as well as her homework. She also complains that the experience in school is often not worth the time and effort of getting there.

In research carried out in several marginalized communities in Zimbabwe last year (Save The Children,1999), including farm-worker villages, many children and parents questioned the value of spending time in an educational system that delivered so few benefits. A school, claims Amina’s parents, is only a building. What is important about it, is what the children learn, what skills they acquire in negotiating the particular challenges they will have to face in later years. “Even if a school were only a few minutes away, we need to ask what relevance it has to our lives and what benefits it brings to our children.” said Amina’s father.

Beatings instead of
stimulating lessons

One thing the children resent in school is the fact that much of the time the teachers, many of whom are unqualified, seem to be more preoccupied with maintaining discipline and keeping control than delivering a useful and stimulating lesson. A majority of them complain about the punishments they receive, including physical beatings, verbal humiliation and working in the teachers’ fields after hours because they have been late for class or not performed as well as expected. Claimed two thirteen year olds from schools on commercial farms,
“There are too many teachers in our school who beat children. I think that when they are beating them, they should not forget that they are children. They beat them with sticks. They are beaten when they miss lessons. You know some of the children come from far away and because of being hungry they end up missing lessons.”

“A bad teacher is one who beats you if you have done something wrong and children will always be afraid of that teacher and soon will end up refusing to go to school.”

The quality of teaching delivered in many establishments is also a source of concern to pupils, some of whom complain that lessons are dull and uninteresting. One is rewarded in class, claimed one twelve year old, by repeating what the teacher tells you, not by expressing oneself or presenting one's own opinion. The heavy emphasis on passing exams can also be restrictive, especially in poorer schools where pass rates in national exams are often negligible. “If the purpose of school is to pass exams rather than learn a set of useful skills,” claimed one Zimbabwean educationalist, “then the only people who will succeed are the small percentage that move on to third level education. But what about the large numbers who drop out of school along the way?”

In commercial farming areas in Zimbabwe, and in other remote rural communities, children also complain about the attitudes of the people sent to instruct them. Many teachers seem to view their deployment to poorer communities as some kind of punishment. They view farm-workers as backward and ignorant, claims Amina's father, and show little interest in their language and culture. As a result they frequently display hostility not only towards the children but also to their parents, which in turn reduces the interest of the latter in involving themselves in the life of the school or the education of their children. Admitted one headmaster of a farm school:

“Another problem we have come across is the lack of parental involvement in the schools, partly because many parents are not educated, partly because they work such long hours, but also because they sometimes feel looked down upon by the teachers. It is a major challenge as to how we constructively involve parents in the school.”

Irrelevant syllabus

But the parents and children reserve some of their strongest criticism around the relevance of the curriculum that is taught in schools. Children are often seen to acquire a set of skills that do not particularly equip them for the life they will lead after completion of their education. There is no agriculture, for example, that is taught in Amina's class yet it is widely recognized that the vast majority of children in farm worker communities will end up doing farm work. The teaching of agriculture does not imply that these children should not aspire towards something different, or be deprived of a set of skills that would enable then to leave this sector. But at a time of major land redistribution in Zimbabwe, and an unemployment rate of over 60 per cent among young people, there is some worry that some of the key skills required to be productive in farming is not adequately supported in the curriculum.

Several of the headmasters, teachers and parents in the above research also voiced their concern about the absence of a life skills component in their establishments. Where it is included it assumes a minimal priority in the school timetable. Yet as one teacher points out, each year in his class some 4 to 5 teenage girls drop out of school because of unwanted pregnancies. Yet teaching issues around reproductive health, the skills of negotiating positive relationships between the sexes, the importance of preventing pregnancy etc. does not receive the attention it deserves in the classroom. Recently there have been some efforts to include a life skills component as an important part of the school syllabus. Lack of instructional materials, however, inadequate training of teachers and the continuing emphasis on academic subjects continues to hinder the development of a subject that would help children to negotiate many of the current and future challenges that will inevitably confront them.

Conclusion

In workshops and conferences around the world, governments and other organizations display their educational credentials by talking of the numbers of children they have attracted to their schools. If they have been unable to reach the intended targets, they pledge more money for school buildings, training of teachers and more furniture. Yet the issue of access to school is inseparable from the issue of what happens to children once they get there. A high level of school enrolment is not by itself a meritorious achievement, unless it is accompanied by the delivery of an education that matches what the children need, both for the job market and to negotiate future challenges.

The example of Amina and her peers should be instructive for educational planers in sub-Saharan Africa, who in the wake of disappointing school enrolment figures in the ten years after Jomtien have pledged themselves to a programme of major school expansion over the next decade. Despite her age Amina is old enough to know the challenges in front of her and what kind of education would best enable her to exploit the opportunities that will arise. While more schools are needed to avoid the long, arduous walk she has to make to the nearest establishment, more of the same is not what is needed but something also qualitatively different. We would do well to reflect on her final observation,
“At the moment a child who completes grade seven picks cotton in the farm and a child who hasn't even been to school also picks cotton. At the end of the day they are paid the same and those who have gone to school are laughed at by the others for having wasted their time.”