Education

Perils of ignoring ECD

Malawi’s Minister of Education, Science and Technology Eunice Kazembe made a startling revelation while opening a National Literacy Conference recently.

“Seventy-nine percent of children aged between five and 10 in the country are illiterate,” she said.

Even worse, she added, over 70 percent of pupils in Standard Six do not have basic reading skills.

According to a recent report by the Association of Early Child Development (AECDM) repetition is one of the worst challenges facing primary schools.

“Currently, repetition rate in the country’s primary schools hovers at 21 percent,” says AECDM executive director Charles Gwengwe.

It is important to underline that these challenges schools are only effects of a cause that is quite debatable.

For Kazembe, the deeper cause of the challenges facing primary schools is lack of teaching materials.

Save the Children’s country director Matthew Pichard agrees.

“The levels of illiteracy in Malawi are shocking and they are no way near attainable. This is because of poor infrastructure, a teacher to pupil ratio is also a big challenge,” he said.

This school of thought purports that primary schools would be better if more resources were pumped in.

For instance: build good schools, train more teachers to reduce teacher to pupil ratio, buy more teaching and learning materials, pay teachers well and so on.

But these strategies have been at the heart of the challenges and solutions in primary education for a long time. Yet, despite years of being advanced, there have barely helped to better the situation in primary schools.

“We continue to look at the challenges facing primary schools from the perspective of the learning environment. We are yet to centralise our focus on the child, the embryo of the problem here,” says Gwengwe.

And he argues: “As a country, as long as we continue to ignore issues of early child development (ECD), we will not stop talking about illiteracy, about repetitions and dropouts. These are effects of a deeper cause of our failure to effectively train these young ones in their early years.”

Symon Chiziwa, a lecturer in education psychology at Chancellor College, argues there is strong evidence that children who attend ECD programmes are more likely to stay in school and perform well academically, and also contribute positively to development.

In fact, even primary teachers agree.

“It is easier to teach a child that attended ECD because are sociable; they easily respond to instruction, they are articulate and confident,” says Orlean Nkhata, a Standard Two teacher at Karonga Old Mission Primary School.

To the contrary, those that did not attend ECD are generally not the same.

“The challenge, principally, is to bring them into a culture of school. They don’t mix well with friends, they are quite slow to understand and to respond to instruction, and, they are overtly shy and withdrawn. Such kids need special attention, and with the high teacher to pupil ratio, you cannot manage. That is why they barely perform well in class,” she says.

So how is the country losing out by not investing in ECD?

According to Kazembe, countries that have increased literacy levels by 20 to 30 percent have seen simultaneous increase in gross domestic product (GDP) of eight to 16 percent.

Arguably, then, there is a strong link between literacy and one’s contribution to development. Hence, with revelations that 79 percent of children aged between five and 10 in the country are illiterate, it follows that Malawi’s future human resource is militant to development.

Not only that. Gwengwe says in an effort to address the challenges primary schools face, government continues to invest billions of kwacha in trying to remedy the situation.

“How much money, in almost each and every fiscal budget, goes to, among others, the buying of teaching and learning materials and training of more teachers to reduce the people teacher ratio?

“What we need to accept is that these problems emanate from our continued ignoring of ECD, the root—the basis of every education system worldwide. As such, if we begin to invest in ECD from now, we will note that as a country, we will not just save the billions we spend for firefighting, but also lay a strong foundations for our education system,” he says.

Dr Steve Sharra, a renowned educationist, adds that ignoring of ECD exposes children to extreme inequality and wealth disparities from the moment they are born.

“Those that go to private schools have a better chance of starting school early, encountering picture books and toys from an early age, but have no chance of encountering Malawian toys, local-language rhymes and folktales.

“Those that go to government schools have to wait until they are five or six to start school. They have little chance of encountering any educational materials apart from the official textbook,” he says.

The results of that, he adds, are the social inequalities and wealth disparities among Malawians today—something government ends up spending billions to fight.

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