Education

I just got confirmation this morning that Aunt Gert is arriving in Windhoek next Wednesday at 12:55pm. I would love to bring a contigent of children as a welcoming committee, but they have school. Her arrival is the same week as three other volunteers so the BNC will be full of helpful individuals.
Yesterday was a nice day at the center. It was the first day of the new school term, so kids were showing up in their squeaky clean uniforms. Catholic Aids Action pays the school fees for most of the children at the BNC, including school supplies, tuition, and uniform. Overall, 20,000 kids in Namibia are put through school by CAA. At the center yesterday a group of about 20 college students from Furman College in South Carolina came to the center to check it out. These one day visits always seem weird to me, like the children are on display at a poverty museum for white Europeans/Americans to observe "in their natural habitats" for a few hours. I understand it is important for awareness and even financial donations, and those that come to gawk...er.. observe mean well, and to be fair I was probably similar the first few days, but it is always a little weird. The kids eat it up though because they get spoiled with attention and 20 people are willing to take their picture. Anyway, I got talking with one of the students and he was asking about how things can change in a country like this. I told him to mind his own business and punched him in the face for asking such a dumb question. As he walked away crying, it occurred to me that maybe his question wasn't so dumb and I reflected on it. I began to think about the major social problems of a place like Namibia and one of the biggest, along with AIDS, alcohol, and abuse, is education. Just yesterday Macrenne came up to me with a beaming smile on his face and with pride told me he passed to the next grade and showed me his report card. Indeed, he had passed.... with a 30% grade in every class. I would be interested to know how all of Macrenne's grades were exactly the same. While, at minimum, they imply he is not performing in school, to me it sounds like the grades were a bit subjective that all came out to exactly 30%. To that end, there seems a fault in the teacher's ability to evaluate the kid- either she doesn't care that much or simply is not that able to effectively teach. In this country every child up to grade 9 or 10 passes automatically to the next grade. So regardless of literacy or grades, a child is pushed from one grade to the next. How can a country raise kids into succesful adults by doing this? The school books are of poor intellectual quality- one book Salome showed me of hers had a poem about a child taking pride in beating another child. The math book I saw had simple, unedited errors and typos. Knowledge is power and as long as these kids are in the dark, they will struggle to grow out of their environment of poverty. I think education and health should be the top priorities in this country- and every country. Even if Macrenne passed with a grade of 70%, as long as the mentality is only on "passing" or "failing" and not on achieving higher grades and excelling, I think there will be major flaws in education. Foreign aid to countries like Namibia should put heavy focus on education and teacher training and the countries that receive such aid should be held accountable and be micromanaged to ensure that results are achieved.