October 30, 2009

My computer crashed last week and I lost several entries. I’ll try to rewrite a couple of them now.
I suppose I should give some overview of the schools here. Education in Tanzania is based on the British system. Students study in primary school for seven years, in secondary school for four years, and then in a sort of post-secondary school for two years. Most university degrees take only three years afterwards. In Kenya and Tanzania everybody associated with the education system is preoccupied with the numbe of years in each level; if people asked me what education was like in America, I would say “eight-four-four” meaning eight years primary, four years secondary, and four years in University; students and teachers would immediately understand. I could say many other things, of course, but spitting back three numbers is a good way to change the topic. The first level of secondary schooling is called O-level; the second is advanced, or A-level. At the end of each tier of schooling, students take an exam to determine if they will continue to advance; no grades are awarded during the course of the year and this exam is the only record of the student’s achievement.
I’ve seen a lot of differing statistics on the percentages of eligiblechildren enrolled in school, but most likely some 70% of the population now will enter primary school and some 2-3% eventually finish A-level. Maybe one half of one percent of the population continues on into the university. Children cannot begin schooling before they are seven, and given the delays after each level of exams most people here are lucky to finish secondary school by the time they are 21; several of my students are older than me. The first president, Julius Nyerere, was obsessed with education and adopted the titel “Mwalimu” or teacher. I have a series of speeches, in English and Swahili, about his goals to create an egalitarian, socialist society through the education system. He failed, and now the school system is in tatters.
Primary school is taught in Swahili. Secondary schools are supposedly taught in English, although among most teachers fluency is very poor and even A-level English (!) classes use a mix of Swahili and English. Advanced students take only three core subjects, along with a weekly seminar “General Studies” and religion courses twice a week. Scienc estudents who don’t study mathematics as a core subject also take a course called Basic Applied Mathematics. Physics, Chemistry, and Biology classes are comparable to AP courses in America, except the material is somewhat broader than an AP or introductory University course. Mathematics students learn pre-calculus with some little smattering of derivatives and integrals midway through their second year. The syllabi are terrible.