Namibia

What is successful learning? Is it being able to parrot back the information on a test or does it imply something to do with understanding?

This afternoon I read stories at an after-school program in Windhoek, Namibia. The elementary school children were enthusiastic about So That’s What God is Like and Lulama’s Long Journey Home. They asked for more and more until my voice was scratchy. A dozen stayed, looking at books and reading them for themselves after others had gone outside with a rugby ball. When they were ready to put the books away, I moved to the other room to help with homework.

A twelve-year-old girl was studying for her sixth grade social studies test. The three types of marriage are monogamy, polygamy and polyandry. A family is a group of related people usually sharing a common home. In some cultures you become an adult through gradually assuming responsibilities. In others, like the Namibian Herero culture, a girl cannot wear the traditional Victorian dress until she has been through the ritual at age 20 of being introduced to the sacred fire and the ancestors.

The twelve-year-old in front of me could tell me all about what would happen when she turned twenty, but she kept reading ‘international’ for the word ‘initiation’ in her notes, and it was difficult to coax meaning from her rather than a series of sounds that represented her memory of the words she had copied from the board at school. “Prevent egone independent” was her remembered version of “provide economic dependence” in the list of social values of the family. I’m not quite sure what that meant either but it seemed to have something to do with the family providing for children who were not old enough to work and earn money--age 14, according to Namibian law, as I learned today.

Brazilian education used much the same rote memory teaching methods when we lived there. I remember our foster daughter, Queila, being indignant when she didn’t get any points for her answer on a test. She was convinced she should at least get partial credit for her word-for-word quotation from the book. After all, the only word she had left out was the word ‘not.’

“Will you be here tomorrow?” the Namibian girl asked me today when it was time to go home. She was a lovely little girl, eager to do well, committed to memorizing everything in that notebook. But no one has ever taught her to think, to question, to integrate what she is hearing with what she already knows. No one has given her experiences that will fix what she has learned in her mind to remember beyond tomorrow’s test.

“No,” I replied, as disappointed as she was. “I am only visiting.”