English in the Village

I visited my most remote school on Wednesday. Karagasan is right at the end of the road, the last point, stuck out on a beige limb on the map of Sabah. Past here, the road becomes a track wide enough for two people to walk side-by-side, branching off to tiny villages and farms. Most of the students board at the school - 35 girls, 34 boys, all squeezed into two small rooms from Sunday night to Friday afternoon. There's no electricity, apart from a little solar power that's used for the headmaster's office, where there's a single printer and laptop for staff to use, although the classrooms have all been equipped with useless lights and fans.

One of my teachers here tells me "What's the point in teaching these students English?" I can see his point (but only a little!) when I watch his class on animals and their sounds, and only one student has ever seen a horse. Also, the curriculum tells him to teach chicken ("chick chick") and hen ("cluck cluck")... There's also no pig in the curriculum, although most of these Christian children have pigs at home.

The children chant after him "HORSE! COW! HEN!" then it's time to match the animals and their sounds in the workbooks. I wonder around the classroom to have a look, but none of the children seem able to carry out the task. It turns out that only 8 of the 35 students are able to read - and this is Year Two. All eight readers went to preschool, which naturally gives them an advantage, but the other 27 somehow managed to get through the whole of Year One without learning to read. Why? "Because we don't have time to teach them, we have to get through the curriculum." Blaming the government seems to me to be avoiding the point that teachers only teach for around 2 or 3 hours a day, and, on average, spend ten minutes preparing. Surely in the other 4 hours of the teaching day an educator can find a free period or two to teach their students to read?

The highlight of the lesson is singing Old MacDonald Had A Farm - the students get so enthusiastic about belting out this song that we end up doing seven verses!