Publication: Learning Essentials for International Education: A Compendium of Summaries
Date
2010-03-23
ISSN
Published
2010-03-23
Author(s)
Abadzi, Helen
Abstract
The sound of children's voices
reciting in unison could be heard from afar, as our mission
approached a school in rural Cambodia. Inside a second-grade
classroom, students took turns at the blackboard. One
pointed with a stick at a list of words written by the
teacher, while the rest recited. A colleague approached,
wrote on the blackboard the same words in a different order,
and asked the children to read. Suddenly, there was silence.
Most kids had merely memorized the sequence of the words and
could not even identify single letters. This scene is
frequent. In the poorer schools of low-income countries,
many students remain illiterate for years, until they
finally drop out. With some care, the process is observable.
Typically the teacher writes on the board some letters or
words and asks students to repeat them. The letters may be
scribbled, the children often sit at a distance, textbooks
may be insufficient, and children may not have anyone at
home to help them read. But they do repeat the words in
unison, getting cues from a few knowledgeable classmates.
The teachers stand by the blackboard, address students at
large, and call on the few who perform well. How come this
issue has not attracted attention? One reason is that in the
middle-class schools of capitals students perform much
better. Soon after our rural observations, we observed
second graders in a middleclass school of Pnom Penh fluently
handling the extremely complex Khmer script. However, the
schools of the poor have less time for their students. There
is teacher absenteeism, a lack of textbooks to take home,
parental inability to make up for school weaknesses, no
specific curricular time for reading. The result has been
chronic illiteracy, high dropout and high repetition rates.
To reduce repetition and maximize enrollments, some donors
advise governments to promote students automatically.
Citation
“Abadzi, Helen. 2010. Learning Essentials for International Education: A Compendium of Summaries. GPE Working Paper Series on Learning;No. 10. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/27860 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”