Educational Disparity

“Please always remember the secret of survival is to embrace change, and to adopt...you see, you cannot draw lines and compartments, and refuse to budge beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.” A Fine Balance

I have been thinking a lot lately about disparities that exist in Mali. I have thought most about Educational/ Intellectual/ Scholastic disparity as well as Economic disparity, but I will try and write something worthwhile about Educational disparities here. I will try not to compare things here in Mali to things in America because Mali or America alone are (is?) complex enough without comparing and contrasting.
The big statement here is that Mali is a country with people with degrees of all kinds down to those who have never set foot in a classroom. My village has a doctor, pharmacist, three midwives, and a Traore (my joking cousin) whose role at the CESCOM is unclear to me. I would call him a male nurse, but those two words probably would not bode well here. There are people who have gone to university, others who had vocational school training, some who stopped at the end of high school, middle school, or elementary school or any level between if they failed a grade too many times. In my village the development paperwork says 33% of students fail every year. Then there are other who have not studied at all and may only be able to write their name, if that.
I wonder how people coexist. I can see how they interact, but I usually don't know what they are saying. Even if I did understand, I probably wouldn't understand the undertones of the conversation. One of the biggest educational (I say educational because it is “smarts” from a school and has no relation to their actual intellectual capacity as far as I am concerned) disparities occurs at the CESCOM. Women come to have their babies weighed once a month. The nurses/midwives write down the date of the next weigh-in on their charts. The women carry the chart that records the baby's vaccinations and weigh-in information in a small plastic bag because they have no purses or filing cabinets at home for these records. It is good that women have the record available, I guess so they know what vaccines their child has received and know the date they must return for the next weigh-in.
I say I guess because nearly 25% of Malians are illiterate and you can guess what sex makes up more of that 25% than the other. Women can't read the date of their child's next appointment that is written on their card. They will often come to the CESCOM and wait an hour for the weighings to being because they don't have a watch- and things rarely start on time here to begin with- only to be ridiculed because they are supposed to come next week. It's right there on the card, but they don't have a clue how to read what it says.
And it isn't that they aren't intelligent. Take the children at the school for example. Mali has recently adopted, and is still working to enact, a mother tongue instruction policy, meaning children are initially taught in their mother tongue and French is slowly introduced to them so that all classes are taught in French by the time they reach middle school. This is a good idea. What is the point of teaching students if they don't understand the words you say, right?
Well, kind of. This philosophy works well if you live in a village where the mother tongue language being taught- in this case Bambara- is the actual mother tongue of the students. When I visited the first grade class, during the break, the teacher explained, in Bambara, that many students come to school with limited Bambara speaking skills. Their parents may speak Bambara, but the first language children learn is Samogo in my village. As a result, he spends most of the first trimester teaching Bambara. While I was there they practice nefo, kofe, numan, ni kini (in front of, behind, left, and right). It took an entire hour to complete the lesson. It is a difficult lesson for first grades, but I imagine it would be easier if it were taught in their mother tongue.
Why not teach in Samogo then? The number one reason would probably be resources. There is no information, not even a dictionary, about Samogo online that I could find, although a French search might produce more results. There are no textbooks written in Samogo. The teachers come from other villages where other minority languages, such as Senofo or Fulani, are spoken or where only Bambara is spoken. They can't teach in a language they can't speak!
As a result, by the time a student is ready to take the CEP or sixth grade exam to go to middle school, they already speak Samogo, Bambara, and French. In seventh grade they start learning english. These kids are smart. Their intellectual ability is capped by the system, not by they themselves in many cases.
To continue that last thought, let me give you a few more observations. For starters, there are over 90 students in every classroom at the middle school. There are closer to 50 or 60 in the elementary school. This is because my village is the only one with a middle school in my commune so students bike from 3-7 miles away to attend school, if their families allow it. In the 9th grade there are 143 students. The tables are five wide and eight deep. The tables are meant for two students but four must sit at each. The students must wiggle out of their seat one appendage at a time and then walk across the desk in order to exit their desk or return.
After school the girls sweep the floor, wash the tables and chalkboards, and on the weekends students do grounds keeping work or plant crops. The kids in my host family help with the cooking, cleaning, childcare, or mend to the animals before school, between the morning and afternoon session, and again after school. On the weekends they spend eight hours a day in the field harvesting that season's crops. It's astounding how much work they do.
You can begin to see how things at home may limit a child's education, if they are allowed to go at all. They say school is compulsory, but I've gone on enough walks during school hours to see otherwise and I learned otherwise in training as well. At any rate, it is interesting to think about the effects of education or no education on a person's quality of life and the ripple effect it has. You see why some people have a bit more pep in their step or why others are more reluctant to talk to the doctor or midwife. The blog about my visit with the doctor shows one perspective of an educated person's life on the life of those who are uneducated. The topic of our talk, l'ignorance, tells a great deal.
I guess this interest motivates me to continue to push for literacy in my village. It will empower women to know they can read, encourage them to continue their children's education, and they can learn about sanitation, hygiene, and child care in their readings. By helping themselves, they can help improve Mali.
Dooni, dooni.