Ever heard the one about Tunisia being a country located south of South Africa? Or the one about King Mswati, the name of the capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo? No? How about the fact that Addis Ababa is the capital of Jamaica? You’ve never heard these jokes before?
You must not know my learners, then. Every week, in a bid to bring historically relevant geographical knowledge to light, we learn the names of African countries, their currencies, capital cities, year of independence and first presidents.
The reason we do this is because of a discovery I made two days into my fledgling career: my learners cannot distinguish between capital cities and monarchs, currencies and continents, Africa and the rest. It seemed reasonable for these grade 10, 11 and 12 learners to guess that the capital of the United States must be a place called Asia.
Speaking of the East, another guessed that Maputo was possibly in a land called Korea. It’s no wonder then that exotic-sounding Harare was flung across time zones and oceans to substitute Brasilia as the capital of Brazil. Although most of these answers are misspelt, I’ve learnt to decipher meaning and uncomfortably dole out marks on this basis.
Back in my day, however… you know how that story goes. Nevertheless, several learners surpass the realm of bad spelling and enter the little-traversed waters of Pronoun Creation. Some of the make-believe countries I’ve learnt of through their test scripts include Vhakta, Tizan and Milia.
I’m all for creative licence and were these imaginary lands at the centre of fictional constructs, I’d be thoroughly riveted. Alas, when Jamilia seems a reasonable substitute for Ghana, we have a crisis in educated guessing. How I wish that these were random responses, pranks by learners in response to the odd question they cannot answer.
I mean, I remember those days when the brave among us would draw rocks in response to question 4-point-8-point-1 and request the marker to roll the rock over for the answer. Oh how I wish Vhakta was an exercise in teenage cockiness. If this were true, my laughter wouldn’t be an attempt at warding off tears.
The reality is that, week after week, the class average has hovered around the 30% mark. Those who come regularly are gradually reaping the rewards of sitting around a world map each Saturday. Indeed, visual aids go a long way in communicating senses of place and space.
But the rest seem unable to make use of basic rote learning methods to remember about 15 facts a week, a skill they should have mastered in primary school. At this stage, one expects that the bulk of the facts we are learning should fall into a broader pattern of logically linking the world.
Students should generally know not to look for Côte d’ Ivoire on the Asian continent. They should know that it follows from six times eight equals 48, that 48 divided by eight must yield six. For my learners, there’s nothing obvious about these patterns of thought.
Indeed, there are moments when I witness my class reference popular culture or current affairs to determine the Nigerian currency or compare Mubarak to Mugabe. These moments are, unfortunately, rare and tend to be overshadowed by the foundational problems revealed by watching one learner peruse the entire “P” section of a dictionary, not knowing how to use the order of the alphabet to get to “populous”, a word written on the board. This I did not sign up for. Yet it is my reality, one that I unfortunately suspect to be widespread.
Although I share these accounts in a light-hearted manner, what I hope to convey is the gravity of the situation. I want to teach history, critically. I want to share with my learners the story of who we are. I want them to experience the power that comes with knowing.
I want them to move from a place of epistemic confidence to know that their material conditions are a product of history and that they, through knowledge and action, will master their destinies. I want them to understand our collective plight, to appreciate that wealth is of the nation and must thus be created and shared fairly.
I want them to discover their own historic missions through the process of analysing people through time. This is what I want to do. To do this, however, at least to the extent that it can be achieved through academic learning, requires certain cognitive basics to be in place.
Thus, when I watched a documentary with my learners that suggested that 15-million Ethiopians rely on coffee for their survival, they weren’t able to extract meaning from this statement. One asked if it meant that Ethiopians could not survive without consuming coffee. When I asked them what percentage of Ethiopians are reliant on coffee, given that the country has a population of roughly 80-million people, I was met with blank stares.
They did not know what mathematical method was required to get to a percentage. The inability to marry context and English grammar to unearth meaning, coupled with the inability to do simple calculations, leaves them unable to understand the full implications of situations that are outside their immediate realities.
It follows from the above scenario that one has to do a lot more foundational work before one can hope to convince these learners of the importance of coffee as a livelihoods strategy; as a classic symbol of trade in the global economy; as a site for political action in achieving socioeconomic justice for African farmers.
I fail to convincingly conceal my disappointment in them and the system for falling short of my expectations. It is in these moments, when I’m forced to teach long division instead of history, that I see glimpses of the despair I sought to discourage in my learners.
After all, they know better than I do how little they know. Yet, if they’d been trained sufficiently to just think, if logic had some place in their lives, many more would drop out of the sites of miseducation we continue to call our schools.
Fumani Mthembi heads the social development unit of Pele Green Energy and moonlights as a teacher and education activist