An Education

I am asked more often than you would believe about the American system of education: almost as often as I am asked what exactly we are doing with all the corn we grow if we aren't pounding it into cornflower and then making a flavorless paste the texture of play-doh to eat twice a day (look up Ugali on the internet... it's the national food of Tanzania). So it's past time I explained to Americans the Tanzanian system. 

When they are two years old Tanzanian's start nursery school which is called Chekechea. I like that because it sounds a lot like the word for laugh in Swahili and I always imagine them sitting around and laughing a lot as they learn to count. After nursery school, at about five, they go to Schule ya Msingi (literally “the important school”).

When they are twelve years old Tanzanians finish with Schule ya Msingi and mandatory education. Very few go any further in their education either because they didn't pass the national examination or because they cannot afford the school fees to continue on to Secondary School. School fees at Sadani (a relatively big government school) are 150,000 Tsh for the boarding students per term which is roughly 100 USD.

At Secondary School students do four years of O-level (ordinary level) education at the end of which there is another national exam to determine if they are fit to continue on to two years of A-level (advanced level).

In O-level, for the first time, English is the medium of teaching (at least in theory). If the teachers do speak English in the classroom often its would be almost intelligible to a native speaker. In college my friend Jackson once took a class on existentialism and taught us all what a simulacrum was (a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy...). Unless you really commit to watching foreign television (and have the resources to make that happen for yourself) your English is going to be an imperfect copy of your teacher's already imperfect copy.

In my opinion it's not fair to spring English on them in the secondary school. Swahili is a blessedly logical language. If you tell me the infinitive of a word I can (99.999% of the time) tell you every variation of it given enough time to mull it over. There are also only four possible tenses (the present, the future, the past and the recent past) and the last two are almost perfectly interchangeable. I suppose if you grow up speaking it, you must assume every other language is equally well constructed. The moment when you comprehend the devilry of irregular verbs and the pluperfect must be like a fall from the paradise of a straight-forward trade language.

In A-level Tanzanians choose a “combination” which determines which subjects they study. My school specializes in science and offers three: PCB (Physics, Chemistry, and Biology), PCM (Physics, Chemistry, and Math) and CBG (Chemistry, Biology, and Geography). And yes, the PCM students do look down on all the other combinations as being “soft.” My current favorite Tanzanian rap song contains the lyric “I studied PCM, not PCB!” as a cocky rapper boast. My current PCM students are forever slowing down my lessons by asking for derivations from first principles. Buncha geeks.

After A-level it's university if you pass your exam (and not many do even though the pass mark is 21%) and if not most people go to a two year teachers college and learn to be O-level teachers. Yet another depressing simulacrum.

Recently I was in my evening office hours and what started as a conversation about Logic Gates got sidetracked (evening office hours almost always do) into me explaining to Elia and Justin nursery school to college. When I said most Americans graduate university at twenty-two they both burst out laughing.

“But shouldn't you finish A-level by the time you're nineteen and college by the time you're maybe twenty-two or three?” I asked, pointing at the juxtaposed schedules of the two educational systems I'd drawn on the board in between a million truth tables.

This is the kind of naivete that I thought I'd left behind months ago. Nothing in Tanzania goes on schedule.

Every year the teachers at my school spend hours meticulously drawing up a schedule for all the classes and then spend the next year patently ignoring it. There are scheduled sports and games, scheduled times for maintenance and official people for electricity, plumbing and each dormitory. But life gets in the way.

This week we are preparing for the District Commissioner to visit the school. I asked who exactly that was for days before realizing that no one else on campus was a hundred percent sure what his job was. Despite this, it's a big deal. We've been almost literally painting the roses red for his arrival. Edging all the school's pathways bricks have been laid and then painted white.They won't last more than a week and a half since it's the rainy season. On Friday none of the O-level students went to a single class because they were all doing school maintenance work and all of the teachers were running around trying to supervise them.

“If you're very blessed; if you're very lucky you can graduate on time,” Elia said with a laugh. “Like my young brother. He is starting O-level this year and he's only twelve. I was twenty-four when I took my national examination for O-level.”

“How old are you?” I asked Justin, who I had log assumed was the youngest in my class.

“I'm twenty-three.”

I'm twenty-three too but I don't say so. We just go back to Logic Gates and hoping against hope, all of us, that they pass their national exams.