consider the kenyan education system...

i have been travelling between schools in the outer nairobi area --- a place called ruiru, mostly. some of these are public schools and some of these are private schools.

thoughts:
- they HAVE to make pronouncing "dylan" a part of their carriculum. it gets really awkward in front of a large group of people when they say "and this is...(crowd yells:) MICHEEEELLLE! and this is......uhhhh DURIN?!!!

- bilingual education is hard - most kids learn keswahili from birth and then have to learn english in the end of primary and through secondary school. english teachers complain a lot about how many resources this requires. but since so much of the business language is english, there isnt a super easy solution.
2a - trilingual education is REALLY hard - a lot of kids speak local, tribal language in the home, keswahili in the community, and english at school. as a result, they arent exactly proficient in any of the above.

3 - when i started working with Teachers Environmental Rescue, i was sort of skeptical about how much the environment could play a role in public education. it turns out a lot. a lot of schools feed underpriveleged kids (up to 1/3-1/2 in a lot of schools, and underpriveleged in this sense means no parents or familial income of any kind) with fruit and corn grown on campus (often by students), and the tree nursery that schools have planted, with each kid assigned a tree to care for, is a real source of inspiration and pride for a lot of the kids

- if you think teaching to a test is a problem in america, try classes of 70 kids that are 50% teacher reading out of a book, 50% answering questions from a book. (thats right - 70 kids - the perils of newly introduced universal education) finding ways to integrate art, sport, critical thinking would be real helpful for attendance as well as basic education (as anywhere, is suppose)

- a lot of teachers came up and asked me about how we keep kids paying attention in classes without hitting them. "i think kids need to have good sense smacked into them somtimes" was a quote to remember

- there is a really pronounced problem of getting water for students. many students have to come from home with water or they get none from 7am-5pm

- kenyan kids spend a lot of time dancing. dancing and soccer. soccer and dancing. it is a source of much confusion and merriment that the bearded (when i am described to friends, kenyans looking for me say "the cousin [all white people are part of the same family] with fur" as they rub there cheeks to indicate scruff) man stinks at both

- as in america, there is a pretty big divide between teachers who care and teachers who are over their profession and the challenges that come with it. the most obvious way to tell which teacher is which is to walk into their classroom: teachers who dont care dont tend to actually be there.