Something I am always very aware of at school is not only my position as a year long volunteer (teaching with career teachers), but that I am an American experiencing a different culture through American eyes. That in mind, I do a lot of self censoring, though at times it is very difficult to not speak out on what amounts, in my eyes, to abuse, corruption, and laziness. Those are some big words, so I will do my best to explicate my internal conflict with these ideas, and how I deal with this conflict.
Previously, I have discussed some of the “big picture” issues that Tanzanian schools face, but here I want to discuss more specifically my position as a teacher in a failing school. I have discussed some of the structural reasons for this failure, but my experience is largely personal, and thus quite different from these “big picture” issues, though my personal experience is indirectly impacted by these structural issues, and speaking with other volunteers my personal experience as a volunteer mirrors the experiences of other volunteers across Tanzania. So, while I will specifically discuss my experience with abuse, corruption, and laziness at the school I am teaching at, be aware that these issues are present at schools across the country.
To begin: abuse. While most of the teachers at my school seem to care about their students, in one way or another, this caring sometimes manifests itself in what most Americans would, no doubt, see as abuse. Tanzanian teachers have the tendency to see themselves in a variety of roles. I have mentioned previously, how one teacher specifically laid out to me that he felt he was a teacher, a counselor, an advisor, and a policeman, all in one. Some teachers do embody those all these roles, but many end up more abusive policemen than sympathetic counselor. Students are slapped in the face, beat on the back, and beaten with excessively large sticks. While this seems to be an acceptable norm – talking with other volunteers, there are teachers at most schools who engage in these more abusive kinds of punishment – most teachers stick to the legally allowed three hits to the butt or hand.
For all the talk about corruption as a problem in Tanzanian government and society, many teachers are corrupt in less glaringly obvious ways. This corruption takes the form of laziness as well. They arrive late, leave early, fail to teach their classes (some actually sit in the staff room most of the day talking), and treat the students like servants, sending them on errands and then yelling at them when they have have misunderstood the orders. Some of this is cultural – the young are expected to do what their elders tell them – but to me it feels like laziness. There is also an expectation that teachers should not have to pay for school events. So, when an event like graduation takes place, teachers eat and drink off of money paid by the students or money from the school’s discretionary fund, which one would think should be directed towards funding academics.
As you might expect, it is difficult to see these things and not say anything. Aware, not only of the Western tendency to see the world through a very specific, judgmental, lens, but also of the fact that my speaking out about these issues will not accomplish anything, I do not. Instead, I try to develop conversations about these issues. Some of these conversations have some out in past posts (for example, why students are beaten, the roles of teachers, or why students do so badly in school), but sometimes I feel unable to even raise a topic for discussion, aware that I am the outsider. For instance, I would love to ask another teacher about the teacher who consistently grabs the face of a student with one hand and slaps it with the other, but my feeling is that even in asking this question I am passing judgement about the practice. You might ask, “What’s so bad about passing judgement over an awful practice like that?” And, you may even be right.
But, I also feel like it is not my place to pass public judgement, when none of the other (to my mind) more reasonable teachers have, and there is not a single teacher on staff who I think would be sympathetic to my perspective. Public judgement is a form of cultural imperialism, a kind of colonialism that does nothing to actually change the root of the problem, unless, maybe, you are speaking with a sympathetic party. While I may see these practices as fundamentally awful, I think I have a responsibility to let Tanzanians work these issues out on their own. While I will be giving the District Education Officer a letter with some of my observations at the end of my term of service, I think it is his responsibility – and the responsibility of his fellow Tanzanians – to affect change in their society. To directly confront teachers about these issues, in my position, is a badly formed challenge their way of doing things: I will not need to live with the consequences of such a confrontation because I am a temporary volunteer teacher with no real stake in the system: I am someone to be ignored. I am the outsider.