John Chris, 3, is a famous boy in
his zone in
Gayaza, Wakiso distric
t. He has so many friends, young and old,
including market vendors. When he was about one and a half years, he adopted a habit
of collecting “taxes” from roadside stalls in the neighbourhood.
The confidence with which he
would demand “taxes” made very popular.
“Njagalayo akokulya (I want
something to eat),” he would tell the sellers, not giving up until he had got
what he wanted. Even the days he would be unbothered about them, the sellers
would beckon him to pick his “taxes.” He dropped this habit by himself when he
was close to two and a half years.
On February 2, 2015, John Chris
woke up very early in the morning, excited that he was starting school,
finally. He had on several occasions jumped in the back sit as his father drove
his two elder sisters to school and felt that he too belonged there.
Clad in a white shirt, grey
short, white socks and black shoes, John Chris smiled for the camera before holding
hands with his father to walk to school.
Everywhere he passed he was
cheered on by women and children, the people he had always interacted with in
the days of staying home, eating and playing.
“Am I going to school to play
football and sing?” He asked his father as they neared the school gate.
So many kids were crying,
understandably missing their homes and parents. John Chris, who likes to refer
to himself as a “big man,” promised his father he would not cry.
But soon after clearing with the
administration, his father handed him over to his teacher to be. When she led
him in the opposite direction, John Chris looked back at his father and threw
tantrums. He probably had sensed life would never be the same again.
The following day he refused to
go to school. He told a friend in the neighbourhood that he had finished school.
His father did not bother him knowing that it was just the beginning. But even
the day after John Chris did not want to return to school.
He became the wailing man on the
road every morning for over two weeks. It didn’t matter whether he was at the
back of his grandmother or in his father’s car. He just kept crying on his way
to school. He finally got used and the crying stopped.
But on March 8, 2015, just one
month and a few days into school, John Chris shocked his father with a new proposal.
“Papa I want to change school. I
am tired of this one,” he told his father who had just returned from their little
farm in the countryside where he had been for most of the weekend.
“Why do you want to change school?”
Asked the father.
“I don’t want this school of
books,” the boy said.
“Which school do you want,” asked
the father.
“I want a school with things to
play with,” John Chris replied.
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John Chris tries several things with his bicycle seven
months before starting school
|
His kindergarten, or nursery
school, has some things for kids to play with, including swings, but the boy’s
problem is books. He must be bored with fidgeting to scribble letters in a book
and shouting “ABCD...”
There is a big problem in our kindergarten
education. Oxford learners’ dictionaries define a kindergarten as
a school or class to prepare children aged five for school.
And our Wikipedia calls it a
preschool
educational approach traditionally based around playing, singing,
practical activities such as drawing, and social interaction as part of the
transition from
home
to
school.
Although a kindergarten child
should be typically five or six years, in Uganda we take there our children
even before they are three. There are several reasons for that including tight
work schedules for parents and lack of appropriate and affordable helpers to
keep our children at home.
At that age, children should have
more physical things to play with, to work with. Instead, our kindergartens force
the little children to cram the typical rhetoric of our formal primary education.
They are not given a proper opportunity to think for themselves, and act. This method
of pushing knowledge into heads continues through primary, secondary and even
university education. The more the teachers push, the more knowledge
evaporates. In the end, we get graduates of nothing but years, unable to create
anything.
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| Kids always want to be doing something but we sometimes beat them out of it - we are wrong on many occasions |
We need an alternative system of
education – one which will, from day one, keep our children engaged in doing or
producing something. If John Chris was provided with some semblance of bricks,
sticks and iron sheets, and challenged to build a house, I believe he would find
school more interesting. What do you think of our kindergarten, primary,
secondary and university education?
