Education in Tanzania

There has been wailing and gnashing of teeth in the teachers' lounge during the past week.  The results of the Form IV national exams came out, and over 80% of our school's Form IV students had failing marks.  Overall national results were not much better:  60% of the 400,000 public and private school students who took the exam failed.  These scores are much worse than in previous years, although there has been a noticeable decline during that time.  The questions now being raised in the political and education sectors are predictable: why is this happening, and what can we do about it.

I have only been in this country 9 months, so I probably do not totally understand the intricacies of the situation, but the following is my opinion of some of the causes.

Government policy has focused on a bricks-and mortar approach to getting students in school.  Many secondary schools have been built in rural areas.  Staffing those schools with trained teachers has of necessity lagged behind.  Filling those schools with students actually prepared for secondary school has lagged further.  I don't have first-hand knowledge of the primary schools, but I see their results.  Quite a few students lack basic skills. 

There is little immediate, lasting penalty to students for failure.  In the States we call it "social promotion".  Here, they don't call it anything, they just pass students on.  A student who gets all "F"s on the annual report card is still be promoted to the next grade.  This seems nuts to me. I teach math, which is a subject that builds on what is previously learned.  A student who receives an "F" in math cannot possibly grasp more complicated topics in the subject.  

There are periodic national exams which, in some cases, determine if a student can proceed to the next educational level.  There is one such exam at the end of primary school with 250 total points.  Our school accepts students who score above 70 points on the test.  There is another national exam at the end of Form II.  Starting just last year, failure on this exam means that the student must repeat the form.  A second failure and he or she must leave secondary school.  Options after that include vocational training or going back to the farm, literally.    

Rote learning is taught; critical thinking is not, at least at lower educational levels.  My students are very good at copying every single word I put on the board into their exercise books (they have to do so, as they have no textbooks), but 10 minutes later some of them cannot solve simple problems using the guidelines I have just written.  And, given a word problem, many cannot even decide how to approach it.  This, I have concluded, is more than a language difficulty.

There are lesser issues:  Burnt-out and indifferent teachers (although most in our school are conscientious), no books for students, a culture that does not value reading, students assigned to work duty (chopping wood or cleaning the campus) during class hours.  These have bothered me a great deal from time to time, but I think those I previously discussed are the root causes of the problem.

Can Peace Corps teachers make an impact?  Certainly not in a national sense.  What I hope to do is make a difference for at least a handful of individuals.  The people of Tanzania must do the rest.