…But Are they Learning?

A recent report by HakiElimu suggests that the methods some have taken towards educating children in developing countries may not be the best approach.

HakiElimu was founded in 2001 by 13 Tanzanians with a clear, longstanding commitment to transforming public education for all children. Their action was influenced by a simple fact: education in Tanzania was in a mess, and the many attempts to reform it appeared to go nowhere. Central to their analysis is the view that education has not improved much because technocratic solutions have been applied to essentially political problems, that volumes of technically sound documents produced by the reforms have failed to take hold because they fail to account for the politics of institutional change in Tanzania.

Google.org’s Program Manager Juliette Gimon echoed this thought…

For too long, success in the education sector has been defined by the number of schools and classrooms built and by the increase in student enrollment – measures that don’t necessarily register learning. But the conversation is now shifting: “quality” has become more front and center, forcing governments and development agencies to re-evaluate their policies.

…and cites a few scenarios from the report to support her opinion…

One of the tests was a short dictation in both Kiswahili, the national language, and English (a total of 483 primary school students and 559 secondary school students were tested). While students scored higher on the Kiswahili dictations, HakiElimu found it “concerning that 25% of primary pupils’ Kiswahili dictations were rated “poor.” Pupils who took this test had completed six years’ of schooling in Kiswahili and yet one in four were unable to write a coherent paragraph as dictated in the national language. In the dictations, students in both primary and secondary schools made fundamental errors in punctuation, giving researchers the impression that these things are not taught in schools. Children were often using the improper case for letters. Similarly, many did not appear to have a sense of spacing between words, or between letters in the word and between sentences. Knowledge of punctuation was also limited.”

There are very real implications to this study, suggesting that money being spent on education in the region could be better utilized to provide a higher level of education in fewer schools. Meanwhile, groups like HakiElimu are taking an active effort towards reforming local education policy.