A Public High School in Rural Tanzania

Idodi Secondary School serves 800 students from several villages on the outskirts of Ruaha National Park. 500 of these students are boarders, and their colorful school uniforms are eternally strewn over every bush and branch near the dorms, hanging out to dry after a thorough hand-washing. The boarding students receive three square meals a day, lining up by the hundreds (see pic) at a long tin-roofed shack under which ugali is cooked on small charcoal-fired stoves. On a good day the school has 15 teachers, so average class size is about 70. On pay days the school shuts down because the teachers have to take the long bus ride to Iringa (read my last post) to get their money.

At Idodi Secondary as at every other African public school, teachers beat their students. Our host, a 26 year-old social studies teacher, seemed young and progressive enough to understand our opinion that beatings are old-fashioned and harmful to the kids. No way. When you’ve got a class of seventy students and four books to share among the lot of them, beating is the tried and true way to maintain order. Besides, he said, he never feared the beatings his teachers administered to him when he was young - in fact, it made him study harder.

Perhaps that is why, as evening fell and the generator switched on, hundreds of students gathered in the dimly lit classrooms to continue studying well into the night. Or maybe it was that those students didn’t get a chance to look at the books during class time.

For me, cultural relativism is vital to thinking about this situation. I come from a country where a teacher would quickly be jailed for striking a student. I also come from a country with a stranglehold on the world’s resources, whose privileged students are coddled from birth to ensure they make it into $40,000 a year schools, and whose minority students are devalued at every level of the educational system. With so much, we achieve so little. Classrooms are filled with the latest technology, yet few students can be convinced that school is a place they might enjoy, let alone a place where they might choose to spend hours studying every evening.

Maybe it’s just human nature – the more you have, the lazier you get; the less you have, the harder you work. The sad thing is that even for those Africans who graduate from university, paid work in their field is often impossible to come by. I’m reminded of the Zambian trucker who gave us a hitch back to the TZ border. A trained social worker, he was forced to start his own trucking business because of lack of work. Not that there’s not a need for social workers in Africa, there’s just no one to employ them. So now this well-educated man drives his dangerously old truck 1800km twice a week from Tanzania across northern Zambia to the DRC and back, peddling dried fish, soap and candles to a people whose government can’t meet their basic needs for safety and sustenance.