Angry teachers: class and contempt in Malawian society

One September morning in 2013 I was walking into my office building in Lilongwe when I noticed a huge crowd swarming around the notice board. My office is located inside a district education office, and teachers visit on a daily basis. But the young people crowding around the notice board on this day were not teachers. 

They were prospective student teachers. They had applied for openings in the Open and Distance Learning (ODL) teacher education programme, and had come to find out if they had been selected. This district office was the nearest centre they could visit to find out their results. Some of them had walked long distances on foot, others had used their hard-earned money to come by public transport.

I went on twitter and asked if there were computer programmers who could come up with mobile phone applications that would save these teachers long kilometres of walking or hundreds of kwacha for transport. A number of programmers expressed interest in the idea, and we agreed to meet. Using Facebook, we extended the invitation to teachers, and two female teachers joined our meeting.

We held our second meeting a few weeks ago. We met at the school where the two female teachers teach. Out of twenty teachers on the school’s staff, nine attended. The purpose of the meeting was to learn from the teachers what kinds of solutions they would like to explore with the use of technology, using mobile phones or computers, to make their classroom work easier. I was in for a bit of a surprise.

Although it is located a short drive from the centre of the city of Lilongwe, in a relatively wealthy, medium-density location, this school has never had electricity in its entire nineteen-year history. Needless to say, there is not a single computer at the school. Nothing surprising there. Having become a ubiquitious feature in classrooms in wealthier parts of the world, computers are non-existent in classrooms in poor countries such as ours.

A Primary Education Adviser supervising a teacher

While each of the nine teachers who came to the meeting had a cellphone, only one was able to go on the Internet. She was the only one on Facebook. The majority of the children who attend the school are those of maids, garden boys, guards and other menial workers. The children of the residents of the area go to expensive private schools.

It soon became pointless to talk about educational technology for classroom use, so the meeting turned into a free-for-all session in which the teachers let loose about their anger and frustrations:

Teachers in rural areas receive hardship allowances, but we in urban areas have worse hardships. The little salary we get goes to paying for minibuses or kabaza. We have too many children for one teacher. Too much record-keeping we have no time to prepare lessons. Rents are very high in cities.

We have served for eighteen years without a promotion. The few that get promoted wait for two years before their new salary is effected. When we try to go the ministry to enquire all receive are insults. Newer teachers are being promoted before our very eyes. No loan scheme. No medical scheme. I have bad lungs from inhaling chalk dust I need expensive specialist medical care twice a year and I can’t afford it. Reforms are imposed on us by senior officials who copy things from abroad where they go and eat fat allowances.  

We can’t even attend workshops locally. We introduce new ideas and others take credit for them. We nurse sick children, tend to injured students, handle blood, settle cases amongst students. Nurse, judge, teacher, all in one, no recognition. Now they are bringing the community to come and monitor us. Parents are entering classrooms and demanding to see our lesson plans and other records. . .

The first time I got a sense of how sore with anger Malawian teachers are was in 2004. I was doing field work, and I spent seven months talking to primary school teachers about conditions of their work. On my first day with these teachers in 2004, I had set aside two hours for the teachers to open up and describe the conditions in which they work. They were unstoppable. We spent the entire day on the topic, and they were only getting started.

Fast forward ten years, and the anger feels as raw as it felt in 2004. I realised, ten years ago, that our teachers have so many issues they keep bottled inside them and they are hungry for a chance to air them out. That is exactly how the teachers I met recently felt also. The past ten years have changed nothing in the way our teachers feel about the conditions of their work. They feel not only hopeless and helpless, they are convinced that nobody cares about their plight.

Even after I had explained twice that I had come during the lunch hour because I was not visiting them in any official capacity as I did not work for government, nor was I visiting them on behalf of the NGO that I work for, it did not matter. When I explained that my hope was for us to discuss things that we could do for ourselves as teachers, rather than waiting for someone to come and help us, I got some nods of agreement.

One thread that ran through the issues the teachers raised was one of disempowerment. They feel powerless to change anything. As if they have not had enough disrespect and disempowerment from everyone else, parents are now being empowered to come into the classroom and demand to see the teacher’s lesson plans. This is the lowest things can go, they said. Did they spend two years in college and ten years in the classroom only to end up reporting to a semi-literate parent who knew nothing about teaching? This they cannot take.

It was at this point that it started dawning on me the extent of the problem of accountability and class in this country. We are a highly segmented and class-divided country we refuse to be accountable to anybody we consider to be beneath us. This is a common human trait, and we are no exception. But our moral institutions have become too weakened to provide any framework for accountability to people we are expected to serve. If they are beneath us, they have to bow down to us, not the other way round. More problematic is that our political leaders excel at the rhetoric of humility when they fully know that in practice they expect us to worship them.

This is why many Malawians are pessimistic about the prospects of anything coming out of the on-going cashgate investigations. It is probably what was going on in the minds of those who partook of cashgate loot. With nobody to be accountable to, what was there to fear? This was best expressed by Watipaso Mkandawire in response to the article titled ‘Kudya Nawo: How Cashgate Became aMindset’ (The Lamp, February 2014 issue; also posted here).

Student Teachers from a DAPP TTC

Mkandawire argued that graft, greed and corruption were human problems that occurred even in countries where inequality is not as pronounced as it is in Malawi. “Our main enemy in Malawi,” wrote Mkandawire in a comment, “is our inability to create and maintain governance systems and enforcement [mechanisms] of those systems.”  He went on to give the example of how in countries where governance systems are observed and respected, being caught over-speeding or drink-driving results in a penalty. In Malawi, you can palm-grease the traffic police officer and get away with no penalty.

A society in which the teachers think of themselves as being at the bottom rung of the social ladder is a society in danger of cannibalising itself. If teachers cannot feel appreciated and see the rewards of hard work and dedication, they cannot teach hard work and dedication to their pupils. If a society cannot decide what values to inculcate in their children, and demonstrate those values in deed, that society cannot offer much inspiration to the next generation.

But it need not be that way. It is up to those Malawian teachers who understand the roots of this problem who can take up the mantle and begin to change things. It begins with how teachers are taught, and how they are valued. The DAPP Teacher Training Colleges are a good example of how teachers can be taught to be self-empowered problem-solvers. Empowerment is a self-authored process. Nobody can empower you. You can only empower yourself. For a fresh start, let us begin with the children, and those who teach them.

Note: A version of this article appeared in the Malawi News edition of Saturday 8th March, 2014

Why Malawi’s education sector is in a mess Part II

In the first part of this article I argued that the mess in Malawi’s education sector is not occurring in a vacuum; it is a reflection of the state of the country’s governance and political economy. I also suggested that the internal causes of the problems are tied to external causes. In this concluding part I discuss the external causes, focusing on arguments made by a prominent Malawian development economist and an American educational researcher. I end by calling for more investment in the professionalism of Malawi’s teachers, and in addressing the root causes of the anger that has gripped the country’s teaching profession.

Writing on the discussion forum Nyasanet in October 2012, Malawian development economist Thandika Mkandawire, professor and chair of African Studies at the London School of Economics, helped put into perspective some of these causes. Professor Mkandawire listed mistakes that the IMF and World Bank had admitted to making in the decades that developing countries were forced to adopt prescriptions for which there was no guarantee that they would work. In the decades leading from independence of African countries, international financial institutions had what Professor Mkandawire called an “anti-tertiary education stance.” 

This stance led to declines in investments in human capital, whose results are unfolding today. The mistakes these institutions have admitted to have had a “profound impact on African economies,” examples of which include “serious shortages of energy, lack of a skilled labour force, and an absence of long-term financing,” according to Professor Mkandawire. The lack of a skilled labour force and the absence of long-term financing have struck at the very heart of African countries’ governance and social service provision. They have crippled the capacity of countries such as Malawi in not only the education system but right across the entire public sector. 

This Standard 3 class at a school in Lilongwe City meets outside because of classroom space problems 

Steven J. Klees, professor of International and Comparative Education at the University of Maryland in the USA, argues similarly in a September 2012 article, titled “Why Does the World Bank Hate Teachers?” In much of the world, including Malawi, teachers are some of the lowest paid civil servants. Professor Klees traces this phenomenon to World Bank policies that pushed for low salaries for teachers. He also accuses World Bank policies of promoting teachers’ “ignorance,” a result of prescriptions to governments to cut both pre-service and in-service training for teachers, as part of structural adjustment programmes.   

Untrained teachers have become a common full time feature of many educational systems around the world, another mistake Professor Klees attributes to the World Bank. When I started teaching in January 1990, it was after a ten-day crash course that introduced us to the basics of the curriculum and lesson planning, after which we were unleashed onto thousands of unsuspecting learners. In the mid-1990s Malawi hired 20,000 thousand school leavers and left them handling full classes on their own for years. 

Malawi is still years away from achieving the optimal teacher-pupil ratio. Education policy documents prepared by the Ministry of Education indicate a target teacher-pupil ratio of 1:60, considered the ideal. Professor Klees argues that this ratio prescription came out of a flawed World Bank study. Anybody who has taught young children knows how demanding it is to handle just a handful. For the World Bank to have prescribed 60 learners in one classroom just shows how out of touch some policies can be. Professor Klees notes, cynically but poignantly, that this prescription could not have been made for children of World Bank staff. We can add to that list children of Malawian cabinet ministers and high ranking government bureaucrats and other elites. 

What this means is that countries such as Malawi must never accept policy prescriptions without subjecting them to scrutiny and examining them for suitability to our contexts. Currently many donors are prioritizing early grade literacy, in recognition of the pivotal importance that the ability to read holds for the future of a child. But Malawi’s needs are such that little can be achieved in early literacy as long as classes continue being very large and learners continue having no books to read. Government needs to make its priorities clear to donors, and to take an active role in the formulation of donor projects so as to ensure relevance and efficacy. Pilot projects are helpful, but it is pointless to have pilot project after pilot project without applying the lessons nationally.

We cannot afford to revert to training just a few thousand teachers at a time when school enrollments are at an all-time high. Handled well with resources and commitment, the Open and Distance Learning (ODL) model is the most efficient way of training a large number of teachers at once, using new instructional technologies. In other parts of the world, the ODL model is being used to upgrade teachers’ minimum professional qualifications from a certificate to advanced degrees. We need to invest in the professionalism of teachers, providing them with resources so they can form professional associations and acquire advanced qualifications. 

We must address the root causes of the seething anger that has demoralized teachers. We must motivate them with meaningful career prospects. There are some excellent, highly motivated Malawian teachers out there. We must invest in identifying them and supporting their efforts. It is high time we started having teacher professional associations and national teaching awards as is the case elsewhere.  Only when we have understood the broader context of Malawi’s socio-economic problems and its crossover effect in education, and made the necessary investments as described above, can we begin an earnest attempt at getting it right in education.

Click here to read Part I

A shorter version of this article appeared in the 'My Turn' column of The Nation newspaper (Malawi) on Monday 17th December, 2012.

Why Malawi’s education sector is in a mess Part I

In its editorial of Thursday 29^th November, The Nation newspaper expressed alarm at the revelation that Malawi’s education sector was performing worse than our neighbours. The Nation posed the question “Where are we getting it wrong?” The news of our dismal educational performance came via the Minister of Education, Science and Technology, Eunice Kazembe, who, as was reported by The Nation newspaper, was speaking at an Education Joint Sector Review meeting in Lilongwe that week. 

The Joint Sector Review is a periodical gathering of donors, Ministry technocrats, academics and other educationists to discuss progress against benchmarks outlined in educational policies and implementation plans. Amongst the problems the newspaper quoted the minister highlighting was that seventy percent of Malawian pupils lacked basic skills and necessities, and that most of these learners drop out before reaching Standard Six.

In this two-part article, I want to argue that any analysis of the problems that have paralyzed Malawi’s education sector ought to be understood in the larger context of Malawi’s governance and the political economy of the country. I also want to point out that what we see as local and internal causes of these problems have their roots in a broader global context of economic and education policy prescription and domestic adaptation.   

Part of Lilongwe Teachers College campus, in a 2004 photo

It would be an exaggeration to argue that education is the only sector performing miserably. A lot of Malawians still suffer from chronic hunger, despite all the efforts of the Ministry of Agriculture. Most Malawians have no access to a hospital, and the few available hospitals have no drugs. Medical personnel are overworked and disgruntled. Many Malawians die needlessly, due to sheer negligence and lack of empathy. Electricity continues to be a nightmare for the 8 percent of Malawians who have access to it, and water supply is highly erratic.

The majority of Malawians go without police protection, and most of the times the police are unable to prevent crime or apprehend criminals, leaving Malawians helpless. The conditions of our cities are atrocious. Garbage is everywhere, most roads are dirt roads even in the capital city, and have not been maintained since they were constructed. Our city markets are so filthy it’s a miracle we don’t have armageddon cholera epidemics.  

We therefore need to put the malaise of the education sector into perspective. The failures of the education system are symptomatic of the general failures of the country as a whole. As I am writing, the majority of Malawi’s primary school children have no access to a school textbook. Textbooks were last distributed to schools in 2008, and schools no longer have those books due to wear and tear. A niece of mine told me recently her Standard Six class has three English pupils books against sixty eight pupils. A day later a group of Primary Education Advisers told me entire classes in their schools do not have a single pupils’ book. 

And our teachers are an angry lot. They are always paid late, teach in classrooms unfit for purpose, live in houses not worthy the name, and are treated as second class citizens. Recently Malawians have lamented on social media sites remarks purportedly made by the president herself demeaning teachers. She is alleged to have said, at a public rally in Thyolo, that farming was a better paying preoccupation than the teaching profession. As teachers have no means of expressing their anger directly at their ministry or at the country’s leaders, they resort to other tactics easily misinterpreted as incompetence unprofessionalism. Left unaddressed, the anger our teachers are nursing is slowly but steadily eating away at the educational fabric of the country.

The causes of the problems bedeviling Malawi’s education sector are local and global, internal and external, structural and political. They are the same problems ailing every aspect of Malawi’s governance system as well as social architecture. They must be addressed in a holistic manner.

Much has been said, lately, about the problems of leadership that have stagnated the country’s progress. Little has been mentioned about those Malawians who have persevered against the odds, and have been an inspiration to others. Teachers are amongst these unappreciated leaders. 

It’s hard to acknowledge, in the current atmosphere, but there are things that still work in this country. We need to highlight them, celebrate the leaders behind them, and make them an example for everyone else.

The local, internal and political causes are easier to recognize than the global, structural and external problems. There is a part where we as a country, as The Nation editorial alluded to, are indeed “getting it wrong”. But there is a part where it is global structures of economic governance and geopolitical power that are “getting it wrong.” Somewhere along the continuum, the internal and the external causes are connected.

Inefficiencies such as late salaries and bureaucratic bottlenecks that choke career prospects for teachers are part of the local and internal causes. So is the size and structure of the country’s economy, which makes it impractical for teachers and most civil servants to be better paid. There are capacity problems that have led to millions of kwacha being returned to donors or to the national treasury because we are unable to utilize the money, despite all the known problems that are, paradoxically, caused by lack of money. The global and external causes also factor into the local and internal causes, something we will explore in part II.

Click here to read Part II