education system
Friday and his classmates on a rainy day in 2013.
As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I taught English at a secondary school in Malawi, a sliver of a country wedged between Zambia and Mozambique. It’s poor[1], and the education system is screwed up. If I may elaborate:
Malawi’s official language of instruction is English, but few of your teachers are fluent. There aren’t enough qualified math and science teachers either, so it’s entirely possible you’re learning math from someone who doesn’t understand it, in a language they don’t speak. On top of all that, it’s acceptable for your teachers to hit you, flirt with you, show up to school drunk, or not show up at all.
You have to memorize information by rote for the one exam administered per class per term. Of course, a 50% is a pass, so pretty much everyone moves on to the next grade. As a result, the classrooms are completely overcrowded: 80, 90, 100 of your peers jostling each other for space. You’re definitely sharing books — there are only 11 literature books for all the students in Form 3 and Form 4. You might also have to share a desk, or if you’re really unlucky, a chair. Or you might not have either. Hope you’re comfortable sitting on a concrete floor for eight hours!
And of course, this all takes place inside a brick building with a corrugated tin roof and not even so much as a ceiling fan. When it’s hot, it’s an oven. When it rains, your teacher is inaudible, and you and the other students who bothered to show up are mostly concerned with avoiding the puddles that spread across the floor.
Your day doesn’t start with school, by the way: It starts with hard physical labor in the field, or with household chores. Then you have to walk, sometimes miles, to school, trying to keep your uniform clean even when it’s muddy or dusty. If you’re a girl, this trip is a gauntlet of sexual harassment; no matter who you are, you have chronic malaria, and HIV is a real possibility. And if it’s the month before harvest and your family’s food supply is dwindling, you’re getting by on one meal a day.
School isn’t free, either. Your mom might scrape together the $8 for your school fees by selling tomatoes in the market for 3¢ each, but then your dad might find that money and go out drinking with his buddies. Bummer dude, you don’t get to go to school this semester.
All of this leads up to one exam, the MSCE, a standardized test that determines your entire future. It’s only administered once, at the end of Form 4. If you fail, you have to go back to Form 3. If you pass, you qualify for college… but you have to compete for limited spots and even more limited scholarships with all the kids from town whose parents could afford to feed them every day.
You could have been the smartest kid in your class, and still end up working in the fields like everybody else.
[1] I use the word poor and not developing because as Dayo Olopade asks in The Bright Continent, “developing” toward what? Toward developed, of course — you know, like America. That’s a pretty arrogant assumption, isn’t it, that Malawi wants to be America? Maybe it just wants to be Malawi with enough food.
The issue isn’t “development;” it’s that most Malawians are broke and don’t have a lot of options beyond farming and selling stuff in the market for less than a nickel. So let’s call the problem what it is. Then maybe we can solve it.