Kellogg
Community College’s main campus displays a quote by W.K. Kellogg that reads,
“Education is the only way to really improve one generation over another.”
It’s
a great quote and an absolute truth.
I
think about that quote from time to time here as I consider what life in my
village will be like 5, 10, 20 years from now.
Two of my the neighbor kids stopping by my hut on their way home from school. Pretty dope uniforms, eh? |
As a volunteer I’m supposed to educate, but I work mainly with adults, people out of school. Some volunteers work primarily with children through different clubs and even by teaching in classrooms, but that’s not for me. Kids are too high-energy, I’d rather play games with them than teach, and I’m deathly afraid of saying something that they’ll listen too closely to and it’ll mess them up for the rest of their lives; like saying “What’s up?” instead of “How are you?” Last year a couple of boys nearly failed their English exams for writing that as an answer. These are the same reasons I switched midway through college from an education major to an environmental sciences focus — because you can’t give a tree a complex for years to come.
I didn't have any other photos related to education, so I decided to post more pictures of children. This is my headman's youngest daughter, Priscilla. |
But
things weren’t always so bureaucratic and regulated. The grandmother in my
village said that when she was a little girl there were no schools for any of
the children. You learned only what your friends and family taught you.
It
began to improve for her son, my village’s headman, when schools were offered.
However, to go to school you had to register due to the local chief’s decree.
But because it was new, on the day that the education men came around to
register the boys, his aunt hid him in the forest fearing that he was going to
be taken away and forced to fight in a war. Eventually he went to school and
made it as far as 7th grade.
This is the middle son of my headman, Nathan. I also call him the "Body Guard." He tends to hang around my house and chase all of the snot-nosed or crying children away. He's a real public service. |
Unfortunately,
most children in my community don’t finish school. Due to a lack of funding or
no pressure from parents at home to continue their education, the children
don’t finish. Of my headman’s nine children only one has finished all of the
way through grade 12 — his daughter Virginia.
At
times, it seems like getting an education can be a testament to one’s endurance
as some children walk well over two miles one way to get to school, and once
there the classrooms are packed with children — sometimes as high as 90
students to one teacher. The gender makeup is often male-heavy because girls
tend to drop out sooner to help with chores at home.
Should
a child finish school and have the financial means to continue through to
college Zambia offers a lot of options in the forms of technical colleges,
private universities, and public universities: the largest two being the
University of Zambia and Cobberbelt University. Online universities (mostly
based in Europe and the United States) are becoming very popular with those
wanting to pursue a graduate degree. But, as mentioned, most don’t make it to
the university level, or finish through the 12th grade for that matter.
Zambia’s education system has
come a long way since independence in 1964 and having children reach over their
heads to try and touch the opposite ear, but it’s still slowed due to large
class sizes, a lack of resources, overworked teachers, and, most importantly, a
lack of emphasis from parents at home to instill the importance of education in
a child’s life.
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