The Beautiful Tree (39 page)

Kenyatta believed that this education system had some advantages over what the British were imposing. It emphasized acquiring practical knowledge in its context, using what he called “the indirect method,” where “instruction is given, as it were, incidentally, as a mere accompaniment to some activity,” which he believed was superior to the rote-learning methods, removed from reality to the classroom, that the British were imposing. Furthermore, traditional education gave primacy of place “to personal relations,” which was far removed from what he saw in British education. In short, he suggested that there was a
fitness of purpose
in traditional education, which “may not have some valuable suggestions to offer or advice to give to the European whose assumed task it is in these days to provide Western Education for the African.”

It had a fitness for purpose when it came to traditional African society, but perhaps it wasn’t suitable for a modern society like the one Kenya was to become? Perhaps this is true—and perhaps Kenyatta came to realize it on his return to Kenya. But it’s particularly interesting to note that the system the British sought to impose on the Africans in Kenya was strongly resisted and the resistance took the form of
creating private schools
.

The European model of schooling was introduced in Kenya toward the end of the 19th century when the Christian Missionary Society opened the first school near Mombassa in 1846. In response to increasing demand for education, the colonial authorities established a Department of Education in 1911. Missionary societies were given government grants to help fund the building of new schools. However, they wanted to give academic education only to European and Asian children—African children were to receive only industrial and agricultural training. Christian teachings became compulsory and African customs and traditions were played down, or banned altogether from the publicly funded schools. African children were also barred from learning English until the last year of primary school.

Suspicious of the aims and motivations of the state, in 1929, the Kikuyu in Central Province began to boycott mission schools and demanded an end to the missions’ monopoly on education. After failing to persuade the government to open its own secular schools free from missionary control, the Kikuyu
began to open their own
. During the early 1930s, extensive fund-raising activities took place, private schools were erected, and self-help groups formed. Each private school was governed by a local committee, responsible for recruiting and paying teachers, setting school fees, and conducting other fund-raising events. As private schools became established, joint meetings were organized, culminating in the founding of the Kikuyu Independent Schools Association in August 1934. While KISA emphasized the need to negotiate with the colonial authorities, some school proprietors wanted to remain entirely free from European influence. A rival association, the Kikuyu Karing’a Education Association, was therefore established soon after. By 1939, there were 63 independent Kikuyu schools educating a total of 12,964 pupils.

To help meet the increasing demand for trained teachers, in 1939 both KISA and KKEA agreed to support the opening of a private teacher-training college, Kenya’s first ever, public or private, at Githunguri. When Jomo Kenyatta returned to Kenya in September 1946, he was appointed principal of Githunguri, before being elected president of the Kenyan African Union. Over the next five years, Kenyatta would divide his time between these two organizations. Under his leadership, Githunguri would become the private school movement’s unofficial headquarters, and KAU would of course develop into the political party that would eventually lead Kenya to independence.

It is interesting to contrast the successful rise of Kenya’s independent school movement with comments such as those expressed by the British provisional commissioner for Kikuyu Province in 1929: “It is indisputable that the Kikuyu people, in their present stage of development, are incapable of organising, financing, and running efficient schools without European supervision.”
⁴⁵
On the contrary, the Africans were capable of financing and operating their own schools without government support, and did so well into the first half of the 20th century.

The rest is history. A police investigation of the Mau Mau Uprising early in 1952 sealed the fate of the private schools. When the government declared a state of emergency later that year, both KISA and KKEA schools were closed. In Kenya’s struggle against colonial oppression, private schools became the battleground. On becoming president of Kenya in 1964, Jomo Kenyatta championed the
Harambee,
or “self-help” spirit, on which he believed the future development of Kenya would depend. It is clear that at least part of his inspiration for this movement came from his experiences in private education. Private schools were an integral part of the African liberation movement against the British. Perhaps today we can see the emerging private schools as a new liberation movement against the legacy that the British (and other colonial powers) brought to their countries?

History’s lessons can guide us today. The World Bank argues that a country’s history has “a bearing on which service delivery arrangements are likely to succeed.”
⁴⁶
My historical journey made me realize that private education has been a norm in many countries, before the Western powers imposed their own systems, and even a part of the liberation struggle against these imposed systems. What was it that Bob Geldof said? That development can succeed when people ignore “the advice of ‘the experts,’ to find ‘their own
culturally appropriate
model.”’ Perhaps the vital lesson of history is that a centralized public education system is not the culturally appropriate model for peoples in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa today. In championing private education for the poor, we may well be championing a return to the cultural roots of the people.

12. Educating Amaretch

William Easterly begins and ends his latest book,
The White Man’s Burden,
with the heart-rending story of 10-year-old Amaretch, an Ethiopian girl whose name means “beautiful one”: “Driving out of Addis Ababa,” he passes an “endless line of women and girls . . . marching . . . into the city.”
¹
Amaretch’s day is spent collecting eucalyptus branches to sell for a pittance in the city market. But she would prefer to go to school if only her parents could afford to send her. Easterly dedicates the book to her, “and to the millions of children like her.” He returns to Amaretch in his concluding sentence: “Could one of you Searchers”—the word he uses to define entrepreneurs of all kinds—“discover a way to put a firewood-laden Ethiopian preteen girl named Amaretch in school?”

The Searchers I’ve encountered on my journey—the educational entrepreneurs who’ve set up private schools in places not unlike where Amaretch finds herself—are already finding the way. The accepted wisdom—what everyone knows—is that children like Amaretch need billions more dollars in donor aid to public education before they can gain an education. And the poor must be patient. Although public education is “appalling,” “abysmal,” “a moral outrage,” “a gross violation of human rights”—all epithets commonly used to describe the “government failure” of public education—there is no alternative. The poor must wait until the Modern Macaulays sort it all out for them. It’ll take time, but it’s the only way. There is no silver bullet.

Behind the scenes, unassisted by donor involvement or government intervention, the poor have found a silver bullet, or at least the makings of one. The route to the holy grail of the development experts—quality education for all—is there for all to see, if only they’ll look. By themselves, the poor have found their own viable alternative. The solution is easy: send your children to a private school that is accountable to you because you’re paying fees. Perhaps it’s all too easy a solution for the development experts (even taking into account some remaining complexities—such as how literally
everyone
can access private education, of a desired
quality
—which I’ll come to in a moment). The poor
just did it
.

Sometimes it seems to me, as I reflect on all I’ve seen on my travels, that what the poor
just did
is invisible to those with power and influence—the development experts, as I’ve called them throughout this book. Is it invisible because it arose out of the myriad decisions of individuals, rather than through any grand development plan? Individual entrepreneurs, like Reshma and Anwar in the poor areas of Hyderabad, India, or BSE in Makoko, Nigeria, or Theophilus in Bortianor, Ghana, or Xing, in the remote Gansu mountains of China, or Jane in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, all recognized the desire of poor parents
like them
to have a decent education, saw the problems of public education, and decided that the best way forward might be to start a school. They took a risk, started small, scoured around for teachers and buildings, experimented with what worked, found that parents liked what they were doing—or changed things around until parents did—and their schools grew and grew. Others saw what they were doing and thought it seemed a neat way to help their community and make a little money as well—sometimes conversely. And individual parents—like Victoria’s fisherman father and fishmonger mother—anxiously aware that not all was well for their children in government schools, calculated that they could just about afford the private school, gave it a try, found it worked, and told others about their success.

Is that all too simple for the development experts? It’s not my place to explore why many with power and influence seem to have difficulty accepting the ease with which the poor have said enough is enough and proceeded with their own, highly workable solution. I’ll get on with presenting my findings, in conferences like the one in Oxford, in this book, and wherever else people will listen to me, and try to do the best I can to convey some of what I’ve found around the world. For what I’ve found seems to be a cause for celebration. There’s no “TV tragedy” here, yet another depressing story out of Africa, nor another dismal tale of how the poor in India and China are sidelined as their countries juggernaut toward development. Instead, the poor are empowering themselves. En masse, they are abandoning public education. It’s not good enough for their children. And they’ve found a superior alternative. That’s a good news story, isn’t it?

But there’s still plenty to be done, for those of us who want to help. The poor have found the makings of their silver bullet, but Amaretch is still out of school. So what is to be done?

There seem to be three problem areas we can usefully address. Reaching Amaretch and children like her—those out of school altogether and also those stuck in dysfunctional public schools—is the first. The second concerns educational quality. Although private schools for the poor, my research has shown, are better than public schools, there is still plenty of room for improvement. Third, there is the genuine information problem currently experienced by parents, an information asymmetry as the economists would put it. How do parents really know whether their school is any good? How can they even more reliably avoid private schools that are not up to scratch?

I’m not about to say, here are Three Big Plans to counter these Three Real Problems. That would be precisely the wrong approach. To borrow from William Easterly: “Has this book found, after all these years, the right Big Plan to achieve quality education for all? What a breakthrough if I have found such a plan when so many other, much smarter, people than I have tried many different plans over fifty years, and have failed. . . . You can relax; your author has no such delusions of grandeur. All the hoopla about having the right plan is itself a symptom of the misdirected approach. . . . The right plan is to have no plan.”
²
Agreed. Rather than new Big Plans, I want to point to the general ways in which we can start small and work our way up—and by “we,” I mean thousands of small-scale philanthropic and aid agency projects, working hand-in-hand with thousands of small-scale educational entrepreneurs—trying different approaches, building on what works, and rejecting or modifying what doesn’t. So many little bits of information are out there in the market, known only to parents, children, and entrepreneurs, that can move the solutions forward. So many different levels of incentives for parents, children, and entrepreneurs can be harnessed to make the solutions work. We don’t need an overarching plan at all. But here are some pointers to what might work.

Private schools already serve huge numbers of the poor. But not every child is in private school. For some, their parents can’t afford the fees, or can’t afford the opportunity costs of not having their children working for the family purse. So they either don’t send them to school at all (like Amaretch) or must send them to a public school, where they’ll likely feel abandoned. Others have parents who aren’t particularly bothered about their child’s education, with the same effect. We don’t really know how many such children there are—the figures from the aid agencies exaggerate the problem because they don’t take into account children already attending unrecognized private schools, off the state’s radar. But of course, it’s nonetheless a significant problem that must be addressed.

But an obvious solution presents itself: many children like Amaretch, from families far too poor to afford it, are
already
benefiting from private education, through the scholarships, free seats, and concessionary places, that private schools are offering. In my research, I found that nearly one in five of all students in the slums of Hyderabad receive free or subsidized tuition based on need. The Searchers who’ve created private schools are
already
reaching children like Amaretch, but not yet Amaretch herself. It’s not rocket science to see how she, too, could be helped, building on what is already being done.