Opinion
Monday, April 10, 2000
Open a School, Sell Ignorance, Grow Rich
By CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO
The results of the Primary Leaving Examinations, the lower and higher secondary schools, have come and gone. Now it's time for the usual recrimination.
The marginal (or "backward") districts will as always complain that their kids haven't done well because they don't have electricity at school or home and therefore can't study at night; they will also point out that the children are perpetually hungry and walk long distances to get to school.
In Kampala and the bigger towns, the complaint will be that the children of the well to do � who live in a stimulating environment with TV, video and computer games, and whose parents can afford to buy them books with coloured pictures � go to good, expensive schools and so have an unfair advantage over the slum children.
Then there is the grey area where some unknown power arranges for the academically challenged children of famous and influential parents to pass with high grades. And the purely political area, where a sprinkling of good grades are scattered over selected schools around the country to cover up the fact that education outside Kampala is a mockery of the name.
One ill of the examination system in Uganda is fairly old: cheating. In recent years, university students have been nabbed sitting exams for the "real" candidates, who were hiding in a toilet nearby.
In some subjects though, even a smart impostor or a privileged social status can't help students. The number of students failing Mathematics and Science is alarming. In many schools, the problem is facilities. Most schools don't have laboratories to speak of, and students only see something as basic as test tubes on examination day.
Maths is another story, with its sorry state being blamed on many factors ranging from boring, overbearing teachers, to the claim that Africans are incapable of logic and don't have the problem-solving culture necessary to crunch numbers.
The people who make these arguments commit the obvious mistake of thinking that the idiocy of most African politicians is reflected among the people whom they rule.
The one question that never gets asked with any seriousness is whether Ugandan children get good value for all the money and heartbreak their parents invest in their education. The answer is no, they get shortchanged.
Education is possibly the biggest con industry in Uganda today. Many headmasters and school owners are interested primarily in making a profit out of education. No problem with that, except that they don't take the trouble to give their students any decent education at all.
Many headmasters want their schools to be the best so that they can charge high fees and still fill classrooms. Apart from outright cheating, they employ two very harmful tactics for getting good results.
At the time of registration for examinations, they sort out the smart and average students. The smart students are registered with the school, and the average ones at another school.
This is usually done by private school headmasters, and they will usually register what they consider the lousy students to sit their exams at a lowly rated government school in the neighbourhood. The headmaster in the government school collects a bribe for rendering this service.
When the results of the final exams come, some of the private schools have all their kids passing in first grade.
Headteachers who fear being caught in such a scam, opt for a low-risk strategy. They pick the best students and put them in one class, or in front of the class, and leave the poor ones to doze in the back. They grill, drill, and sharpen the "super kids" into examination machines.
Thus a school might have four students among the best 10 in the country, but the school itself will not be among the top 10 in the country because of the indifferent performance of the mass of students who were locked out of the "super class" and ignored.
Education in Uganda, like its politics, is getting to be a joke
__________
bwanika
url: www.idr.co.ug
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