These Poor Children!

These past days have been spent with some friends in an area just across the harbor from Dar es Salaam called Kigamboni. There are beautiful beaches along this coast south of the city (though I have to say there was more trash in the water than I've ever seen on previous visits -- this might just be a seasonal issue). I was supposed to be with my friends for a few days on Zanzibar, but I didn't bring my passport with me -- not realizing that I needed it to go to the island which is the ZAN of Tanzania. In any case, the days were delightful.

The days have given me an opportunity to reflect on a number of things, to do some reading, and even to do some writing. Sitting on the beach, I saw a number of children who should have been in school. I think the number of school-aged children not attending school is actually growing; it certainly seems to be the case. I am beginning to understand why so many children aren't in school. Let me explain.

One of the things I found myself thinking about is the work of Jerome Bruner, who stands among my great intellectual heroes. When he discusses the work of Lev Vygotsky and the zone of proximal development (am I boring you yet?), he writes of the adult providing a "loan of consciousness" to the child until the child develops his own consciousness. In turn, the child "lends" the adult his/her trust. Without some basic mutual understanding, respect, and trust, it is hard for a child to learn much. And there aren't a lot of adults to trust to be found in the schools here -- in many cases quite literally (for instance, in our local ward secondary school -- 15 kilometres from the nation's capital! where there is not a single science teacher!)

I myself was faced today with a very small indication of the difficulties families and dedicated educators face so often. This morning I left Kigamboni for the Tanzania Institute of Education to buy up-to-date syllabi (otherwise known as course curricula in the US). "The shop is closed today," the guard told me. "Litafunguliwa lini?" -- when will it open, I asked in my bad Kiswahili. "Maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after, maybe some other day." The incident brought to mind the cry of a friend when he found a drunken uncle passed out, bleeding profusely on his family's kitchen floor: "Does no one love this man enough to do something?" Does no one love these children enough to do something?

We're trying to do what we can. We're starting a program to bring our own students into two local villages to tutor primary school children on Saturday mornings (one of them is the very village where there is no science teacher at the secondary school). My goal is to have in three year's time at least two children from these village schools prepared well enough to pass our entrance tests each year.

My dream regarding the teacher's college was to work with two entities often at odds with one another (the government and the advocacy network called Hakielimu [Haki = justice; elimu = education]) on common projects to improve the lot of children. (One of my ideas was to work with the government to provide free tuition to education students committed to teaching in remote villages for the three years following their graduation.) I write in the past tense ("dream was," "one of my ideas was"), I do still hold out hope that the teachers college will be a reality sooner than later and that I might return to assist in its founding -- prayers for this intention would be gladly accepted!

Back to Bruner. As I thought of him, I was reminded about all his writing on the importance of play. Imaginative play is woefully absent in schools here. Early education is an introduction to what might be called classroom corporal orthogony -- sitting up in a chair "properly". For three year olds! I don't know who the developmental psychologists are who are encouraging that children should be learning letters and numbers at this age, who are being taught to "sit still and listen," but the person should be submitted to a similar torture! We do the same now in the US at the level of kindergarten, of course. I was lucky to have had a proper kindergarten experience filled with exploration, imaginative play and practical lessons in sharing, resolving conflicts, etc. These experiences are the important bases for what comes later. (In many countries -- Sweden, which has a very high literacy rate, among them if I remember correctly -- the indication that a child is ready for primary education is the onset of the loss of baby teeth, about 6-7 years old).

Mind you it is mostly the middle class and wealthy here who go to these preparations for primary school. But even primary school in general is an absolutely alienating experience. I am constantly reminded of what a difference it would make if the educational system took Mwalimu Nyerere's Education for Self Reliance seriously. If schools were sensitive to the situation of children and the needs of the community and prepared children for that rather than some ideal location based on foreign standards and needs.

Why aren't children in school? Simple: They don't serve their needs or the needs of their families or villages.

A lot of thoughts are whirling in my head about things educational as they stand here and Bruner. One of my favourite lines from his writing has to do with his reflection on his own parenting. He wrote something like, "I spent a lot of time trying to arrange life so that they could live with what they had." This is what all children everywhere need. It isn't that children shouldn't be encouraged to dream and to imagine all possibilities; not at all. No, it is about the parent, the teacher, and others charged with their formation to create an environment for children to live -- to be fully alive -- with what they have, with what they have been given. And as St. Ireneus insisted so many years ago: The glory of God is the person fully alive.

Enough for now.