The Beautiful Tree (21 page)

I was to get more puzzled the more I read their work. They seemed to agree with what I was finding about problems in public schools, but they didn’t then consider what poor parents were choosing—the private alternative—as a possible way forward. Were they, too, like the academic I’d interviewed from the University of Nairobi, less than impressed by poor parents’ abilities as education consumers?

7. Poor Ignoramuses

When the BBC film crew came with me to Nigeria to make a documentary of the private schools for the poor in Makoko, I interviewed Mrs. Mary Taimo Ige Iji, the chief educational administrator for Mainland, Lagos—the local government area under which the shantytown of Makoko falls. We had traveled in convoy to the three government schools on the edge of Makoko—we in our battered old Volvo hired from a friend of BSE’s in Apollo Street, Makoko; she with a team of five assistants in her brand-new white Mercedes. We had assumed that she would know where she was going—in her office she had proudly said that she personally inspected all the schools in her local government area. In the event, her car waited by the side of the road for us to catch up, so as to follow us to Makoko. It seemed that they had never been there before, not even to the public schools on the outskirts of the shantytown, let alone inside the shantytown itself.

We interviewed her on the balcony of the top floor of the first public school. I found her a rather fierce and domineering woman and was nervous that my questions might have offended her. But I needn’t have worried. Her answers conveyed absolutely that she knew I could only be playing devil’s advocate asking about possible virtues of low-cost private schools: no one could possibly think any differently from what she was saying.

I asked her why poor parents apparently—how could I put this,
strangely
—seemed to prefer to send their children to private schools in the shantytown, rather than to this rather nice public school building. (Actually,
she
had said it was a rather nice building—I found its architecture austere, imposingly grim, and Stalinist. But I went along with her characterization for the interview.) She didn’t mince her words.

“There are many reasons. Parents don’t have the information that the public schools are free; some of them they chose private schools because they are near their homes.” So much by way of introduction. “But the most important point is fake status symbol, in quotes ‘fake status symbol”’—she said this, without any sense of irony, standing above her Mercedes. In fact, at about this moment in the interview she moved to rest her arm on the balustrade, probably coincidentally, but it did have the effect of blocking out the car beneath from camera view. Relaxing now, getting into the swing, she continued: Poor parents “want to be seen as rich parents,
caring
parents, who take their children to ‘fee-paying’ schools supposedly better.” But these poor parents, as we all know, are completely fooled. Poor parents, she said, are “ignoramuses.”

I tried not to flinch as she spat out her contempt for the people I’d been working with. Why? I asked. Because the private schools, far from being any good, “are very poor in facilities, because there is no way you can compare these poor, ill-equipped private schools with government schools where all the teachers are qualified, fully qualified.” The private schools, she said, are in “three categories—the good, the bad, and the very ugly.” It was clear in which category the private schools in the shantytown fit: “. . . these poorly, ill-equipped unapprovable private schools, ‘mushroom’ schools, they are causing a lot of damage, a lot of damage,” she continued. “At the end of it the children will come out half-baked, they are not useful to themselves, they end up in occupations like their parents are doing, they don’t progress further, so that’s two generations, three generations, wasted.”

She couldn’t have been clearer. Private schools for the poor were bad—“very ugly”—because of poor facilities and untrained teachers. Children came out half-baked; generations were wasted. Mary Taimo Ige Iji turned out not to be alone in her views. Her views were the common refrain about private schools serving the poor, that they were schools of “last resort” and must inevitably be offering a low-quality experience (it would be hard to call it an “education”) because the facilities were so bad.

Certainly, the conditions of the schools I visited on my journey sometimes looked miserable. Buildings looked rough, and schools were usually poorly equipped; the teachers, it was true, were largely untrained. I pointed out these obvious criticisms to a young teacher in Ghana, the daughter of the proprietor of Shining Star Private School, which was little more than a corrugated-iron roof on rickety poles at the side of the main road out of Accra. The government school, just a few hundred yards away, was housed in a smart building, newly refurbished by the British aid agency DfID. “Education is not about buildings,” she scolded me. “What matters is what is in the teacher’s heart. In our hearts, we love the children and do our best for them.” She left open, when probed, what the teachers in the government school felt in their hearts toward the poor children.

But was she right? What was the actual quality of the private schools for the poor? Could the human spirit rise above these meager surroundings and still provide something of educational value? And in any case, what was the quality of the alternative—the public schools to which parents could send their children, but which many were abandoning? Parents from Makoko who we interviewed for the BBC film were adamant in their reasons why they sent their children to private school. Perched at the end of a wood walkway above the stinking lagoon, the fisherman father of Sandra, the girl who had first introduced me to Ken Ade Private School in Makoko, told us, “In the public school they do not teach very well and that is why everybody, including me, prefers the private to public school, because they want their children trained for the future.” Sandra’s mother agreed: “In the private school, the teachers are better and when they teach, the children will be able to get immediately what they are saying. That’s why I prefer to send my children to private school.” And another articulate father put it like this: “Going to the public school here in Nigeria, particularly in this area in Lagos State, is just like saying wasting the time of day . . . because they don’t teach them anything. The difference is clear, the private school and the children of private school and the children of public school, the difference is so great that the children of private school can speak very well, they know what they are doing but there in the public,
the children are abandoned
.”

Certainly, when we visited the public schools on the edge of Makoko with the BBC crew we got a sense of that abandonment. I’ve already listed some of the things I first saw in those public schools in Chapter 3. But much to my surprise, we caught footage of something else, something I’d seen many times, but which I never believed we’d capture on camera. A young male teacher was sleeping, sprawled at his desk, while a girl in his class tried to teach her peers from a tatty textbook. Picture the scene: The BBC cameraman, producer, and director arrive in the classroom. The children shoot up, boisterously as always to greet their visitors. They sing out, “Welcome to you, BBC crew.” Still the teacher sleeps. A pupil, embarrassed, tries to wake the teacher. Still he sleeps.

A bit unkindly, the BBC broadcast this bit of the film dubbed over with the voice of Professor Olakunle Lawal, the honorable commissioner for education, Lagos State, a very distinguished gentleman, with a PhD from Oxford University (it was while waiting to interview him that I had met Dennis Okoro, the ex-chief inspector). Giving his view on the past problems but current well-being of the teaching profession in Nigeria, he told us eloquently that, in the past, “teachers were not well motivated because of the challenges attached to their conditions of service. At times you had
haphazard
payment of salaries, and at times
outright non
payment for some. However, in the last six years things have changed considerably. This public school is very good now, you have well-trained manpower.” That was a tad mischievous, putting his voice over the image of the sleeping teacher. Adding insult to injury, they also had Mary Taimo Ige Iji criticizing teachers in the private schools for the poor, and contrasting them with the public school workforce:

I felt sorry for the teacher who prompted all this. Had I not seen so many like him, I would have discouraged the BBC from using his image. But it just seemed to capture so well the problems I’d seen in the public schools for the poor.

But was I alone in thinking that standards in the public schools were pretty appalling? On my journey, I devoured as much as I could of the writings of the development experts. Reassuringly—if reassuring is the right word for the anger and disgust I felt—I found that all the development experts I read seemed to agree that there were dire problems in the public schools—as personified by the sleeping teacher. Public education, they agreed,
was
a disaster. But then their conclusions on what to do about the problem seemed just baffling to me.

All the development experts I read seemed to agree. I’ve already noted the PROBE Report’s findings for northern India, summarized too by Amartya Sen, that teaching was occurring in only half the classrooms visited at random—with some teachers doing exactly what we reported in the BBC film, sleeping at their desks or in the staff room. Others were drinking and making merry. These voices are not alone. I could not find a single dissenting voice in what I read as I traveled. And whenever I spoke personally with any development agency officials in country, they were always eager to tell me of the failings of public education. Here’s a summary of what I was told, what I read, and what I saw for myself.

Public schools are letting down the poor, first, because of their teachers. The most serious problem, said the development experts, is teacher absenteeism. I read the most recent United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report on how to reach “education for all,” which was clear that “random surveys in many countries confirm that teacher absenteeism remains a persistent problem.”
¹
The most up-to-date report from the United Nations Development Programme agreed that in India and Pakistan, “poor households cited teacher absenteeism in public schools as their main reason for choosing private ones.” An academic article on teacher absenteeism reported that in two districts in Kenya, teachers were absent nearly 30 percent of the time and that children would expect not to be taught by public school teachers for over 40 percent of their time in the classroom.

Indeed, it appeared that, so much taken for granted was teacher absenteeism, UNESCO was able to make the following mind-boggling distinction when considering “corruption”: “A distinction should be made between graft and corruption: graft is a relatively minor form of rule-breaking often stemming from need, as when a teacher sometimes misses classes to earn extra income because salaries are too low or irregular. Corruption is more severe.” What could this mean, I thought, other than teachers’ missing classes—hence leaving poor children stranded, “abandoned” as the Nigerian father put it—was now so common as to be considered acceptable? What kind of apology for bad teachers was this?

I read about corruption concerning the allocation of resources to schools too. UNESCO reported a study from Zambia that found “not even 10 percent of books procured had reached classrooms,” but had instead been filched by officials at various levels of the hierarchy. And for teachers and principals, corruption turned out to be just part of their normal day-to-day work life. A World Bank report said that both schoolteachers and principals “solicit bribes to admit students or give better grades,” or perhaps even worse, “teach poorly” during lesson time so as “to increase the demand for private tuition after hours.” In general, “corruption is rife, and political patronage is a way of life.”

And even if officials wanted to do something about problems of teacher absenteeism, what I read pointed to severe difficulties. An academic article from Calcutta, India, reported that teachers as “members of major teacher associations are usually immune from any penal action. If a school inspector tries to take action against a teacher the association ‘gets after him.”’

I suppose it was reassuring that these experts agreed with what I found whenever I spoke to government officials. In the District Office of Ga, Ghana, I had met with the enthusiastic and very friendly Samuel Ntow, who was in charge of basic education. Completely unprompted, our conversation had drifted to his concerns about public education: “The problem we face with the public schools is
supervision
.” In the government schools, he said, there was a “paternal” atmosphere, the head knew his teachers well and so wouldn’t criticize them, and certainly wouldn’t do anything to rock the boat in the cozy environment of the school. The District Office couldn’t monitor them, as it had limited staff and, in any case, only two vehicles, one of which was used exclusively by the director of education, who most of the time, he told me, was away at some development conference or seminar. She was away doing exactly that on the day I met Samuel Ntow. “So there is no effective supervision—the heads,” he expanded, “are too familiar with their teachers, so don’t do this effectively. The public schools have no ability to fire their teachers; the best they can do is transfer them.” This is completely different in the private schools, he volunteered: “If you don’t do well, they can fire you, work out how many days pay you are owed and fire you, or pay you at the end of the month and tell you to leave. We don’t have that power in the government schools.” He told me the story of a public school principal whom they found last year sleeping at school at 9:00 a.m. on a classroom bench; he was drunk and no other teachers were present. “Eventually, we managed to get him transferred. That’s all. There was nothing else we could do.” It’s always the same story, he says, “If teachers or principals are caught in child abuse or alcoholism, then all we can do is transfer them elsewhere. And then they continue with their abuse.”