Quito, Ecuador
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December 29, 1998
Quito, Ecuador |
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So I've been lazy about the "real" letter writing recently, what with all of the holiday stress and everything. Right now, I'm sitting in a fast food restaurant with Christian while he works on his homework. He's doing all of the salaries and benefits of an imaginary company - BY HAND. That's right, graph paper and calculator. It's difficult to imagine, huh? Now I don't wonder as much why they never pay us on time. Let's see, what cultural insights can I give you all this time? We've done the cutting-in-line phenomenon, the death-by-traffic problem and you've heard about the no-explanations concept. How about the education system? For beginners, let's go on record... if I could change one thing in this country, it would be the education system. From kinder-garden all the way up to the university level. Just scrap it and start over again. From the first day of elementary school, these kids have every hint of creativity pounded out of them by memorization, memorization and more memorization. The little girls in my house spend their time copying newspaper articles and memorizing multiplication tables. You ought to see their notebooks - every word is perfect, every graph precise - even color-coded. Dianita knows every square root from 1-100, but I know that she doesn't understand what a square root is. In every school in the country, there are (theoretically) learning English. But I can tell you from experience that 12 years of school-taught English leaves them with NOTHING. All 60 of my Basic I students had it, and none of it stuck because it's emphasis is grammar and structure and NOT communication. In short, the Ecuadorian education system is all form and no function. I see it all the time in my students. While they are copiously copying, color-coding and graphing everything I put on the board, they are missing every word I say. And they are obsessive about writing things down - Trish and I have a joke about this, we say "Put the pencils down! Step away from the pencils! Resist the temptation! I promise, the world won't end if you don't write this down right this instant!" What's more, they are terrified of making mistakes. We've had the "mistakes = learning" talk several times, and we (as teachers) have been taught NOT to correct a student unless their mistake impedes communication. They still struggle with it. I suppose the worst part of this education system is the impact that it has on the creative thinking process. Dad, this will fascinate you. There is a concept in teaching a language known as "the discovery process", where you give the students the tools they need, and allow them to reason out a problem. This almost doesn't work in Ecuador. At first I thought I was just being a biased-English-speaker ("Why aren't they getting this? It's so logical!), but after talking to many of my peers, we realized that this isn't just us. Not only is it culturally different ("You're the teacher, you tell us!), but they've never been asked to do this sort of reasoning the in the classroom before. They want rules that they can memorize, and all I keep giving them is puzzle pieces and exceptions - and then I won't let them write anything down! Of my 60 students, I can think of two off the top of my head who regularly 'think outside of the box'. They are both young - under 22 - and very bright. It's really a shame, considering that what this country really needs is a bunch of innovative thinkers who are willing to break the mold. The universities are a little bit different inasmuch as they are essentially models of the Euro-American model. The two better "liberal arts" universities in Quito - La Universidad de San Francisco and La Pontificia Universidad Católica - are both small, private and prohibitively expensive, as are the science-oriented Politécnica and ESPE. The big public university (30,000 plus students) is La Universidad Central. It's free, on a first-come, first-served basis. Every year, they sleep out on the sidewalks - like a rock concert - the night before registration. I need to ask Christian more about it, but I know for a fact that it has as school of Administration, Law and Justice, Languages, Engineering and some sciences. But, imagine this: sometimes the professors just don't show up. They never know when their vacations begin or end until the day of. They often change class schedules so that two required courses conflict. And sometimes, depending on their year and/or professors, they have classes on Saturday and Sunday. There used to be residential living, but (as Christian put it) there was a lot of sex and drinking, so now they don't have them anymore - dorms, that is. As for sex and drinking, he said that it would be unfair for him to speak for the masses. :) As far as the quality of education, I couldn't really say. However, they've all been through 12 years of primary and secondary education, so I'm inclined to say that the damage has already been done. And, I suspect that there is a fair amount of memorizing done at the University level as well! |