Coloring Between the Lines: A Raging Commentary on the Nicaraguan Education System

Education in the “developing world” frustrates beyond belief.

Imagine sending a child to public school only half-day to a school that does not have an outhouse, or books, or a science lab, or encouragement towards your child’s creative capabilities. Picture the disadvantages to women in this education system in which boys are constantly encouraged to be participative leaders and women are kept humble and quiet (*side-note: just like the Virgin Mary).

In Nicaragua, the government cannot (or chooses not, either way you look at it) afford for children to attend school full-time. Therefore, kids here go to school in shifts. Grades 1-3 and 7-8 have class from 7:30 AM till 12 PM and grades 4-6 and 9-11 attend school from 1 PM until 5:30 PM. This means that a child receiving an education here gets less than half of the class-time as a child going to public school in the United States. Beyond that, teachers are given a 10-12 page guide outlining their teaching themes for the ENTIRE school year and then thrown to the wolves (and by wolves I mean teenagers). This outline (I have personally only seen the guide for the teacher of 10^th and 11^th grade history) has suggestions like this:

Week 1 Lesson Plan:

1) World War I

a. Causes

b. Effects

c. Long-term consequences

Anyone who has ever taught or thought about teaching can look at this outline and see a major fault in the fact that, if given to a teacher in a place in which doing research is nearly impossible… the teacher is likely to use one or two sources and make up the rest, missing many important facts, or brush over the whole theme with a few sentences like “yes the Holocaust was important because a lot of people died and Hitler is now in Hell”.

Case in point: when Lauren and I taught about Hitler and Gandhi in a leadership section of our Critical Thinking class, I’d estimate that 80% of our students had never heard of EITHER of them. GHANDI. HITLER. These are high schoolers we are talking about. We’re currently working on simple math word problems and I am consistently shocked to find that many kids who will graduate high school within the next two years do not know how to do SIMPLE math (addition/subtraction/multiplication/division). The logical reasoning simply does not exist.

I will tell you why.

Picture learning everything you’ve ever been taught in school through the following method:

1) Teacher uses meager outline to create lesson plan.

2) Students do not have a book, and are lucky to have a guide for the class.

3) Teacher writes his/her ideas and notes on the board.

4) Student copies these ideas and notes.

5) Student studies these ideas and notes.

6) Student regurgitates these ideas and notes for a test/quiz.

And what happens next…

7) Student entirely forgets what they’ve learned.

8) Student does not learn to formulate their own ideas, to come to conclusions based on what they’ve learned or read… their ideas are the teacher’s ideas and their conclusions are the teacher’s conclusions.

Can you imagine graduating from high school with the type of semi-illiteracy that leaves you unable to spell simple words? I’ve seen teachers here write in Spanish substituting “b” for “v” and leaving the “h” and “s” off of multiple words. Some of these teachers graduated from COLLEGE and can still not spell. It’s culturally considered so unimportant that I often see students spell their name differently every single time they write it (that may or may not be due to the fact that the name which appears on their birth certificate is not spelled correctly either).

Here’s where the lack of creativity comes in. Children are encouraged to be “just like” all the other students – no skies painted green here. Rather than art class, they are given cartoon Bugs Bunny or Winnie the Pooh drawings and told to color between the lines. When Lauren tried to create a giant paper mache fish last year and let the kids paint it, the project turned quickly into the teachers painting one side and students painting the other- one of the teachers commenting “let’s see who does it better” then not allowing a student to paint on the “teacher” side. I may be wrong, but isn’t the whole point of education ‘trial-and-error’?! If kids are never allowed to formulate their own thoughts, images, or beliefs about the world… they will stay silent and stagnant forever.

More than that, this school in reality only functions three or possibly four days per week because at least once per week there exists a holiday (and therefore days off for teachers) such as:

Day of the Starving yet Un-Spayed Dog who Bites Neighbors but Who Cares Because He has his Rabies Vaccination

Day of the Construction Worker who only Works Drunk on Sundays Beginning at 8 PM

Day of the Cheesy Argentinean Soap Opera Watched by 5 out of 6 Million Nicaraguans Country-Wide Regardless of Age

Day of Loud Reggaeton Played at 6 AM by Neighbors Every Day of the Year

Day of Machismo (aka: Men Rule the World Since the Beginning of Time and Forevermore Day)

Obviously these holidays do not TRULY exist, but you get the idea. Although the official embassy website only posts 11 national holidays per year, I tell you without exaggeration that the NATION of SAN JOSE DE CUSMAPA celebrates more than 70 holidays per year. That’s about 20% of all existing days. If the holiday happens to fall on a weekend, we would never dream of celebrating it on a weekend, we celebrate it either the Friday or Monday that falls closest to the day of fiesta-ing. Therefore every 1/5 school days which could potentially aid children towards their future development is wasted as a “dia feriada” (free day!!).

And, last but not least, the most infuriating thing about Nicaraguan education is…

Drum roll please….

Machismo.

Yes, the macho culture here spills into all corners of society, leaving no teenage girl un-turned. Last month I had a look at our enrollment here at Fabretto and the difference between the amount of girls in 7^th and 8^th grade and the amount of girls in 9^th thru 11^th grade disturbed me greatly. Younger girls and boys post nearly equal enrollment numbers, but after 8^th grade something… though I know not what… happens at this age which causes girls to drop out of school like flies. Maybe it has something to do with the following examples:

1) Cece’s first day in English class, the teacher calls her up to the board and asks her to read a paragraph out loud while the boys in the class (seated on the same side of the room) repeat her after every sentence. The girls in the class are entirely excluded from this activity.

2) Our friend Mayerling’s experience with evangelical parents who pulled her out of school after 9^th grade because they were “convinced that if she stayed in high school she would get pregnant” (yes, that’s very logical). Mayerling wanted to return to school so badly that at age 14 she saved up her own money, working her way until she had enough to buy a school uniform and notebooks to return to school. Her mother, though supportive of Mayerling, never said a WORD to her father about the situation. Now Mayerling, at age 23, still has not finished high school and is stuck living with her crazy conservative parents in a household in which she’s not allowed to wear pants, earrings, has to go to church every night against her will, cannot go to parties or dances, and cannot have male visitors, even if they are just friends.

I think it’s perfectly possible for children to learn a wealth of knowledge about the world without access to books, a science lab, and even outhouses. I even think children can learn a lot in just five hours per day of class, with a teacher who cannot spell (when it comes down to it, that’s not THE most important thing). But a culture and country (government and catholic/evangelical supported) in which half of the population is STIFLED to the point of silence and un-education will never succeed.

And I will never respect a teacher who does not encourage children to color the sky whatever color they darn well choose to.