The Education Reform

7.24.2009

My little brother Richie is 7, and like all Papua New Guineans, a polyglot. His mother, is from Central Province and was raised speaking Motu—and English in her girl’s grammar school. Richie’s father is from Kulkul on the Waskia side of Karkar, but Pop’s mother was from the Takia side of the island so Pops grew up speaking Takia. Richie’s older siblings spent their early years in their mother’s province, learning Motu in tandem with English and Pidgin before moving to Karkar and picking up a smattering of the island’s two tok ples.

This year Richie started first grade. Because his parents are currently teachers—and subsequently live—on the Waskia side of the island, Richie should be at Taleng taking classes in Waskia tok ples, the local tongue, as mandated by a 2003 reform. The much touted and talked-of reform requires instruction in the local language in grades 1 and 2. Richie has picked up some Waskia from friends, but mind you, Waskia is neither the language of his mother nor father and certainly not the “native tongue” the reform had in mind; Richie grew up speaking Pidgin and English.

Fortunately for Richie, a new “private” (though the school fees are the same as any public school) English grammar school started this year at a village about an hour’s walk from our house. Richie takes his bike down the rock-strewn road each day to get to class. But his parents’ know it’s worth it.

This is not the case for many.

The 2003 reform introduced Outcomes Based Education (OBE) to PNG. The good-intentioned reform aimed to reinforce traditional cultural knowledge by teaching folklore, cooking, agriculture, and traditional language in addition to the three R’s. However, in so doing it eliminated a structured curriculum supported with teacher resources in favor of a series of vague “objectives” to be decoded and taught using teacher-tailored (really, written from scratch) lessons. It also delayed English education to grade three, introducing native tok ples in grades 1 and 2.

This should be a boon for native tok ples, which are suffering considerable losses in evermore Pidgin-speaking PNG. The Takia language, for instance, is in particular jeopardy and is being closely documented by SIL linguists/translators currently. Parents, like Pops, have chosen simply not to teach it to their children. Teaching tok ples in schools is one way to preserve these languages, and many will argue, by extension, cultural ways. After all, cultural knowledge is passed on through language, and as one man explained to me, traditional stories and rituals lose some of their meaning, implication, and expression in translation. Not knowing your tok ples means you also likely are unfamiliar with traditional ceremonies. The reform seeks to insure this is not the case. However, in practice the tok ples is largely ignored in favor of Pidgin in the early grades.

What results is a system that schools children in Pidgin, a trade language with limited vocabulary derived from (and as such, often homonyms to) English words. Imagine learning write about the structure you return home to every night. It’s one thing to learn the name in your native tongue and then later to associate that concept with an entirely new word in English: house. It’s entirely another to learn first in Pidgin that the structure is a haus, pronounced exactly like it’s English counterpart, and then later to have to relearn it’s spelling as house (which, for the record, makes far less phonetic sense). Now imagine learning the entire language like this: welcome to my classroom (or as my students are inclined to write: welcam lo’ clasrum bilong mi).

An additional complication compounds the delayed English learning; that is of course that student’s learning in general is delayed. Ask anyone, even my brilliant college-educated friend Christine, and they will tell you that Papua New Guineans just don’t develop cognitively as fast as the rest of the world. For this reason, most children don’t start grade 1 until age 7, 8, or 9 (and even later in some cases if the child is the last born and Mama wants to keep the “baby” around a little longer or if other children are already in school and the parents can’t pay school fees for an additional child). And maybe in some sense they are right for stating what they’ve observed in villages and schools. Or maybe I’m just on oversubscriber to the nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate, but it seems to me that if children’s minds would be stimulated (i.e. schooled) at a younger age, they would develop at a younger age.

Many teachers, and in fact, anyone educated under the colonial system, will tell you that English literacy was much better under the old system because students started speaking and hearing English as soon as they got to school. As it turns out, language acquisition research backs this up. Psychology studies have shown that children must be hearing at least 50% of their words in a language by the age of 7 for them to ever gain fluency in that language. In PNG, students are just starting school at age 7—but not starting to speak English until two grades later when they are well past the fluency cutoff. And even in grade 3, its dubious that most students are hearing 50% of their words in English, since the classroom setting is the only place they are exposed and even there the teachers still favor Pidgin. Ultimately, the failure to teach students either their native tok ples or English is what the reform has largely come to stand for. As a result, many teachers on Karkar have sought to ignore it completely, leaving lessons a chaotic mess of Pigdgin, English, and haphazard attempts to use pre-reform materials to meet vague reform objectives. And often the positive aspects of the reform get overlooked in the melee.

One such positive change is the inclusion of objectives for teaching traditional cooking, agriculture practice, cultural histories and tambuna (origin) stories. Last week, I watched third graders giddily chase each other in a dramatized pig hunt as part of this last objective. (The pig eventually succumbed to the spear, but before the hunter could return with friends to drag his kill home, the pig turned into stone. I’ve seen the alleged stone; it sits a top the hill overlooking Taleng. Digicel built the island’s most recent cell tower at this sacred site this year.) Anyway, the other objectives have also proved fruitful, literally: last week we dined on corn grown by the students in a plot at Taleng. The students sell their produce to teachers to raise funds for school projects, but they also practice cooking traditional dishes themselves. (Though I can’t imagine a single one of my students not having learned the PNG culinary arts from their mamas.) Students also study how to build houses using bush materials and just last week completed another teacher’s kitchen roof with woven sago palm leaves.

Certainly, this applied education (or what I like to think of as tech school training) has its benefits, and I’d argue that it needn’t be an either or choice between skills training and English instruction. Many students will find the skills training most beneficial as they go back to live in the villages and work in the copra plantations when they fail the high school matriculation exam. But those who wish to pursue higher education, business, politics, or pretty much any job outside manual labor must master English.

And sadly, this is not happening under the current reform.