The Beautiful Tree (22 page)

And I heard so many stories in the public schools I visited that made me reel—with incomprehension as well as anger. One government school in Bandlaguda in the Old City of Hyderabad, where I was testing the children for comparisons between public and private schools, contained hundreds of children, all sitting on the floor (there being no desks or chairs). The children were eager to greet me, eager to hear what I had to say, bright-eyed, and really excited about taking these tests for me, that someone was paying them attention. But their enthusiasm for learning normally came to naught. For in their school, only two of the seven sanctioned teachers were present, including the “teacher in charge.” And that would be pretty normal, the teacher in charge, a wonderfully dedicated and sincere man, told me. Two of the five missing teachers had been moved “temporarily” to other schools by the deputy district education officer, where no teachers were showing up at all. The other three teachers were away on in-service teacher training for a week—after they had just had one week’s holiday. The teacher in charge showed me the teacher register; I saw clearly how seldom the teachers were actually present in school. He also showed me the page of “CLs.” He assumed that this was something I knew about, but I had to probe him to learn that it meant “casual leave”: In addition to all the school, national, and state holidays, the teachers unions have also negotiated an extra 22 days of casual leave, plus 5 more days of “optional leave,” plus a certain number of sick leave days! And all the teachers take them. The school must be open for 220 days per year, but teachers must teach for only 193 days, minus whatever sick leave they are entitled to. “The union has wrapped it all for itself,” said the teacher in charge. “How can the children learn if the teachers are so often absent?” Seeing the children sitting on the floor, wanting so badly to learn, nearly broke my heart.

And at another government school in rural Mahbubnagar, in the village of Thanda, I’d arrived with my team leader, Gomathi, during school hours to find only one teacher present. He was reading his newspaper while the children sat idly on the classroom floor; some ran around outside. The other two teachers were on “casual leave,” he told us, hurriedly putting down his newspaper and gathering the children into rows on the floor. One of these women, he told me, was on casual leave because her husband had just died. I gave my condolences. Unfortunately, Gomathi told me as we drove away, this was precisely the same excuse he had used when she had visited the school three months’ before!

According to the literature I was reading, government school teachers have another problem when it comes to poor children: they don’t particularly enjoy teaching them. The World Bank had even coined a name for this problem—“social distance”—that is, government teachers and principals coming in from richer areas of the city to teach in poor communities have little understanding of or respect for their charges. The World Bank report said poor parents commented that teachers “have their noses up in the air and neglect us,” and that they “really have a way of making you feel like you are a piece of rubbish.”
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In the study from Calcutta, I read that teachers and principals blamed poor home-learning environments and lack of parental concern as the reasons for poor parents’ taking their children out of school to undertake jobs. Parents, however, disagreed vehemently. They said that they took their children out of school because of the low quality of state schooling.

“Social distance” was something I encountered time and time again on my journey. I found it in the Makoko public schools where the majority of teachers had never even been inside the shantytown where most of their pupils lived, but drove for a couple of hours from the posher suburbs of Lagos; one even came from a different state altogether and didn’t speak the language of her pupils. None knew that there were private schools just across the slum boundary. The same was true in the fishing village of Bortianor, Ghana, where the vast majority of the public school teachers traveled from the nice suburbs of Accra. And perhaps most strikingly, I found it in the public school that looked down from its Olympian heights upon the slum of Kibera.

Behind the headmistress’s desk was a blackboard listing details of the school. It showed an enrollment of 2,255 students, made up of 1,445 “slum dwellers” and 810 “middle class.” That was her classification, not mine. The headmistress was unabashedly candid about the horrors of having slum children in her otherwise pleasant surroundings. “They don’t even know how to use the toilet!” she complained and gave a mocking demonstration of how they used the toilet seat. “They only know how to squat!” she ridiculed. She told me, “Children from the slum are exposed to a lot of dirty social language; they can even say anything about the teacher, the teacher has big buttocks, and everyone gossips.” And then she starts repeating things the children say to one another: “Your mother and father were [fornicating] in the streets” or “I didn’t sleep last night, I heard my mother and father doing it, and they were doing it again this afternoon.” The slum dwellers, she said, “‘all live together in one room, so these children are exposed to so many bad things, and they spread these things like a virus around.” Things were so bad in the school now, she said, that she was thinking of moving her own two children to a private school. Prompted by this, I asked her what she thought of the private schools in the slums; she told me that they didn’t exist in the slums.

When I thanked her for letting the children in her school from the slum take my tests, I thought I must have misheard her. “Yes, they should have been cleaning,” she said matter-of-factly. Learning? I thought I must have heard. No, the children from the slums should have been cleaning the school, and we had taken them away from that task. Whenever I visited the slum schools after that, I tried to see the children as if through the public school headmistress’s eyes. But I couldn’t. They seemed well behaved, clean and tidy, eager to learn, nothing like the ogres she painted them out to be.

And I found social distance in rural India, where in one public school a pair of female teachers arrived at 11:30 a.m., more than two hours after school had started. Why were they late today? I innocently asked. “There’s only one bus from the town. It reaches the main road at 11:00 a.m., and then the teachers have to walk three kilometers.” These teachers, through no fault of their own, were posted to a rural school. They understandably didn’t want to move. There was only one bus, which didn’t even go as far as the village. So that’s the time they arrived
every morning
.

All this seemed in sharp contrast—it’s worth repeating this—to what I observed in the private schools for the poor, where teachers, whatever faults and inadequacies they might have had, were drawn from the communities themselves. In the private schools, there never seemed to be a problem with teachers’ arriving late for their lessons because of transport; they simply had to walk around the corner to their classrooms. And if they were late for whatever reason, the school owner would be pretty keen to find out why and ensure it didn’t happen again.

To add to absent teachers and social distance, public schools, the development experts I read also agreed, had grossly inadequate conditions. One government school in Bihar, India, highlighted by the World Bank report, revealed “horrific” conditions:
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“The playground is full of muck and slime. The overflowing drains could easily drown a small child. Mosquitoes are swarming. There is no toilet. Neighbours complain of children using any convenient place to relieve themselves, and teachers complain of neighbours using the playground as a toilet in the morning.” The same study found that half the schools visited had no drinking water available. Similarly, a survey in Calcutta found that of 11 government primary schools, only 2 had safe drinking water and only 5 had a playground. Listing major problems in their schools, principals included the lack of electricity, space, and furniture. Teaching in these government schools, it was observed, was being carried out “amidst din and chaos.”

I’d seen so many public schools like that on my travels. One in Kosofe Local Government Area in Lagos State was called Comprehensive High and Junior Schools, Alapere. The junior school was a complete mess; that is all one could say (apart from the head’s office, which was reasonably well apportioned). The buildings were decrepit, fashioned out of crumbling old breeze blocks with tin roofs supported by wooden frames. A few months before, a rainstorm had ripped the roof off one. The hall was completely destroyed, and the wind blew apart half of one of the buildings. The government, the principal told me, had said there were no funds to rebuild. Ruefully, he also told me that Nigeria got 18 billion naira (about $140 million) from the World Bank for universal basic education. “Where is this money?” he asked. None of it was apparent in his school. It was all like the parable of the festival cow, he said: The chief wants to celebrate and so gives a cow for the celebrations. The butchers take their cut, as it were, so we now have the full cow minus the butchers’ cut. Then the cooks take over, and they take their cut too, so we now have the full cow minus the butchers’ cut, minus the cooks’ cut. The waiters then take their cut, so now we are left with the full cow minus the butchers’ cut, the cooks’, and the waiters’. “That’s like the education budget,” he said: “We hear there are funds in the budget, but we don’t see it in our community. We don’t know where the money goes.” The government had also apparently outlawed parent-teacher associations, the head told me, because education had to be free, so he couldn’t even raise money from parents to help improve matters. Free education apparently meant there had to be no resources at all.

The buildings that were still standing were not much better. Classes of 80 to 100 children were crammed in, with smashed up desks, broken walls, and shattered ceilings. On the blackboard of one, the form captain had scrawled some motivational words: “Reflections on Life: take life easy. Life is full of ups and downs. Life is full of joy and sorry. Life is full of successes and failures. Life is full of hardships and enjoyment. . . . A man must work hard to achieve success in life.” It was almost impossible to imagine what one could achieve there. In other classrooms, huge holes were gouged in the blackboards so that you could see into—and of course hear—the neighboring classroom. This was the work of frustrated and bored children, like prisoners scratching away at the walls to break out.

The secondary school, if anything, was even worse. Its roofs too had been ripped off by the rain and wind. It had a huge classroom block, open plan you might call it, with only blackboards dividing the classes from each other. There were 125 students per class; the noise was deafening; the incentive to learn—or to teach—nil. The senior block, where children 15 years and older sat and tried to learn, had 150 children per class, no walls, again classes divided only by blackboards. The heat under the tin roofs was deadening; there were no fans to cool the children, nor even any electricity.

I’d also found the same in India. I visited one lower primary school off the main road of Kishanbagh, in the Old City of Hyderabad, to check on how students were progressing with the tests for the comparative survey of achievement. It was near a stinking pool peppered with snow-white egrets. Cattle and goats wallowed in the waters. From outside, the school looked fine—it was a large, properly constructed concrete building with a decent-size playground. But the roof was leaking, and so there was a big puddle in the first room where I was taken—the room where the fourth-grade students were taking my tests. The children were sitting on the bare floor, cramped on one side to avoid the puddles; the room was full of mosquitoes, which the children nonchalantly swatted away from their faces but which would have driven me mad in a few more minutes.

I thought angrily, why on earth did the researcher allow the tests to be taken in this bare, filthy, infested room? After visiting the rest of the school, I realized it was the best room. There were four others—all large and spacious, but all filthy. There were 40 or so children in two of them. All were flooded, all were swarming with mosquitoes. In one, the teacher had lit a tiny remnant of mosquito coil, bravely trying to do his best to make the classroom habitable. A pack of these coils cost 23 rupees (about 51 cents). The school had no funds to buy them, he told me, so he had resorted to bringing his own from home. The other two classrooms were empty. Why? Because the government hadn’t provided two of the teachers, so these classes were doubling up with the other classes, so at least they had a teacher, doing mixed-grade teaching.

Indeed, the development experts seemed to agree that conditions were so bad in government schools, that they were to blame for school dropouts, not parental poverty or lack of concern for education, or child labor. A report from the British development agency DfID put it succinctly: “Many children, particularly those from the poorest households, drop out of school or fail to enroll as a direct result of poor quality schooling. Parents will be unwilling to invest in their children’s education unless they are convinced of its quality and value.”

With poor conditions and lack of teacher commitment in public schools, it would be no surprise if pupil outcomes were poor. The evidence I read as I traveled confirmed these fears: The World Bank reported a study from Tanzania showing that “the vast majority of students learned
almost nothing
that was tested in their seven years of schooling.”
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A DfID report said that in sub-Saharan Africa, “up to 60 percent of children leave primary school functionally illiterate. This is a waste of human potential, and also a waste of scarce resources.” In Bangladesh, it was reported, fully “four out of five children who had completed five years of primary education failed to attain a minimum learning level.” The Calcutta study article said that “economically hard up parents soon discover that attendance in schools for one year—and even two years—has not meant any substantial improvement in the general level of awareness of their children or in the content of their learning. Such a realisation has sometimes led to the decision that it would make better sense to withdraw the children from school and to put them to work in fields or workshops, hereby adding immediately to the household income.”