A Teacher’s Thoughts on Guatemalan Education
Note: IHF supporter and volunteer Jenica Wozniak recently spent a week at our partner site in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala. We will be posting a few of her observations and thoughts here over the coming week or two. This first piece reflects on her experience working with students in the IHF’s secondary school scholarship program.
A teacher myself, I was eager to work with the scholarship students here in Guatemala and do whatever I could to lend a hand. I tutored a couple of students one morning, and left the library with a web of tangled observations and questions.
Most kids here go to elementary school, though not all of them graduate from 6th grade. I don’t have any data, but one estimate is that about a quarter to a third of them go on to secondary school.
I worked with two kids that morning. Rebeca arrived first and she is sobresaliente en todo (outstanding at everything). Then Francisco arrived, and he needed a bit more help. He didn’t understand everything I said, so Rebeca helped us out by translating into Tz’utujil, the local Mayan language. And he can’t express himself very well in Spanish, so I’m beginning to understand why school is hard for him.
We started with math, which he seemed to understand pretty well. Then came an art-like class, which I didn’t really comprehend. He wasn’t really drawing anything himself, but rather learning about different art terms. We talked about perspective and things like that. And then came the list of vocab words. He had no textbook to reference, just a notebook filled with definitions that included some very tricky technical vocabulary. It looked like Francisco had copied down the definitions from somewhere without bothering to get the spelling right. And he clearly didn’t understand what the definitions meant because they were too complicated. Think college-level terminology and grammar. As we struggled through the exercises, I couldn’t help but wonder how in the world it was supposed to be helpful to Francisco and productive for his education.
In light of that experience with Francisco, I came up with a few thoughts for how towns like Santiago Atitlán might go about improving their educational systems. I’m not an expert in Guatemalan education policy, of course, but here’s what my experience as a teacher leads me to suggest.
First, all of the children need to complete at least the first half of secondary school. Those three extra years beyond primary school provide an immense boost to the array of career possibilities open to a student. The value of education must be recognized and taught. And the school day needs to be extended so that children are receiving instruction for more than four hours a day.
Next, the education must be available. The Guatemalan government must put forth the money so that the children are able to go to school and have the materials necessary to do their work. This is a tough one given Guatemala’s relatively poor economy and the fact that, according to the Heritage Foundation, government tax revenues account for only 11.9% of GDP (by way of comparison, Uganda is at 12.6%, India is at 17.7%, and the US is at 28.2%). But a situation where secondary education costs at least $150 a year in towns like Santiago, where many families scrape by on about $3 a day, clearly calls for some solution.
Finally, the teachers need to learn better strategies so that they can more effectively instruct the students that come to them. They need to simplify the concepts and use vocabulary the students understand. They need to provide activities that allow students to interact with the material. They need to use formative assessment to more frequently monitor student achievement. And they need to provide more individualized assistance for the students who struggle. All these changes are, clearly, difficult to enact, because teachers themselves need training. They are, nevertheless, necessary.
I believe that the well-being of a society depends on the education of its youth, and Santiago Atitlán concerns me. Is this the best we can do? While I don’t imagine I’ll ever make much of a difference in Guatemalan education policy, I am doing what I can by sponsoring a scholarship for one student in Santiago. More on that next time I post.
- Jenica
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