In a Ougadougou school: a worthwhile sacrifice for families? |
Violence
in schools of Francophone Africa doesn’t come from the pupils, but from the system
itself, says a Burkinabé expert
Lord,
I don’t want to go to school any more.
Please, I beg you, take me away from it.”
This “Prayer of a Small Black Child,” written in the 1950s by the Guadeloupean author
Guy Tirolien, remains sadly relevant in black Africa, where schools heap violence
upon children from day one.
In Burkina Faso, for example, children have to switch from their mother tongue to
a foreign one–French– without the slightest psychological adjustment. From October
1 in the year they turn seven, children are forbidden from speaking vernacular languages–such
as Mooré, Peuhl or Dioula–at school. They learn how to read and write in a
foreign tongue, through stories about French villages with their church bells and
lessons that will teach them more about Paris than Ouagadougou, their country’s capital.
Humiliating punishment, such as being forced to wear a donkey’s skull around one’s
neck with a sign reading “Donkey, speak French!” only reinforces the sense that school
is a place rife with conflict.
The school timetable is another source of stress. The few teachers who have the intelligence
and courage to allow a break at nine in the morning– so that children who take animals
out to pasture at 5am can rest and have a snack–are criticized for not respecting
the official 10:30 pause.
For the African child, society as a whole–including the village and the fields, especially
during the harvest season–are invaluable occasions for socialization and non-formal
education. But as soon as they enter a classroom, learning from one’s peers in the
village is over. There is no reward or value attached to helping one another, respecting
one’s elders or the pride of belonging to a family or clan for whose well-being no
sacrifice is too great. Instead the child is encouraged to adopt a competitive attitude
and a brazen individualism that leads to de-personalization, sometimes even to alienation.
Passive
resistance
For
the moment, we only see school violence on television. Here in Africa, the issue
is the other way round. The classic school, created by the French colonial rulers,
is an act of violence against the child, and against Burkinabé society itself.
Our society did not produce this school: it was imposed on us with the clear intention
of conquering our people.
Mission accomplished? The classic school system that has become entrenched in Africa
has fashioned a new kind of person, the “townie.” This new breed lives alongside
those shaped by traditional value-systems, those who refuse to be won over. Schools
are the first to blame for this rift. In this conflict between two approaches, the
traditional education system still holds sway.
Of course, there are not enough schools to serve all the country’s children. Nearly
two-thirds of Burkinabé children have no access to modern schools and 80 percent
of adults can’t read or write. But even when children do go to school, passive resistance
is apparent, with some parents in the north and north-east of the country pulling
them out. For rural people, sending a child to school entails a cultural and economic
sacrifice for the family.
Relevance
and respect
Those
children who are out of the reach of modern schools survive by the strength of their
numbers and the traditional structures that continue to govern all aspects of most
people’s lives in Burkina Faso.
We should not indulge in nostalgia, but confront the situation head on, before the
violence that schools inflict on children spurs pupils to resort to violence. All
the seeds of violence are in the system – discrimination, corporal punishment, humiliation
and sexist clichés in textbooks.
Introducing vernacular languages at school and using them to teach various subjects
is one way forward. Another is to revise curricula regularly so that it remains relevant,
and to adapt the school calendar to the needs of daily life. Why not, for example,
plan holidays to accommodate a child’s initiation rituals, the passage into adulthood?
The classic school is not the final word. Alternatives exist. By critically taking
into account, at every level of schooling, a child’s traditional and family education,
we will help to establish a non-violent school system in Burkina Faso and elsewhere
in Africa. |
