Emma Fawcett reflects on teaching in Guatemala
I've spent the past few weeks working in an all-girls school in Zona 7 of Guatemala City with another volunteer. My students have been wonderful: friendly, enthusiastic, and eager. Their education system, sadly, is not.
Based almost entirely on rote learning, my students spend most of their day either copying from the board or cleaning the school. They are taught to serve and to follow, rather than to think for themselves — mopping the floors and laying out the teachers' supplies on her desk before she enters the room is of superior importance to developing critical thinking skills and liberal arts-based proficiency.
The girls are accustomed to an incredibly regimented daily routine and cannot function without highly specific instructions. One morning, I put some English expressions on the board (i.e. Good morning, hello, please, you're welcome, etc.) and asked my third graders to copy them into their notebooks. The room erupted into chaos with questions: pen or pencil; print or cursive; long notebook or short; copy it exactly as it appears on the board or in two columns? Games and interactive activities are nearly out of the question, especially with younger students, and fellow teachers look on in horror as we attempt to teach vocabulary through songs, like the Hokey Pokey.
The most distressing part, however, is that there is little pressure for change. Guatemalans who can afford private schools send their children there, and the disparities between private and public are astounding. In private schools, students are taught the same lessons twice a day — once in Spanish and once in English. Nationally, English doesn't figure in the curriculm and the students I have been teaching have had no prior exposure to the language. In fact, when another volunteer and I sought to teach at a second school in the afternoons, the principal was so frustrated with our lack of fluency in Spanish that she had no interest in our offer to teach English to her students. The principal and teachers are rather perplexed by the idea of volunteers from Western countries coming to teach in their schools, and they remain virtually unaware of the failings of their education system. As Guatemala has the largest indigenous population of any Latin American country (it ties with Bolivia), many here believe that that children should learn one of the major Mayan languages rather than Spanish. After a trip to the highlands and Lake Atitlan, I could soon understand this perspective, as I heard far more Tz'utyil and Kaqchikel than Spanish. The rift between the education of rich and poor seeks only to preserve the current social stratification, solidifying an already deeply divided society and preventing the growth of a substantial middle class.
The students are also in school for such a short period of time, due in part to the lack of school space. The girls' school starts at 7:40am and is finished by 12pm, with at least an hour off for lunch and recess. The same building is used as a boys' school in the afternoons, from 1:00-6:00 pm. With class sizes of 32 plus, individual attention is non-existent. Schools throughout much of the country are half-empty for most of January, when the public school year begins, as many families cannot afford the initial payment required for registration. If they can afford to send their children to school on a regular basis, the eyeglasses necessary to make them successful and remedial assistance for those with learning disabilities elude nearly all. Many students are held back due to poor performance and/or irregular attendance, so the back rows of most classrooms are filled with students at least 2-3 years older than the average age of the class.
Development is truly a "package deal," for without proper education systems, other efforts to improve daily life for local people around the world remain futile. At Lake Atitlan, Guatemalans in Santiago are fiercly proud of their water purification system, which was constructed by the Japanese. The building flies the Japanese flag and is adored by the locals. Yet, the villages around the Lake continue to burn their garbage or just dump it in the water, deforestation is rampant, and the shores of the lake are filthy with sewage in some sections. As a result, the tap water is still not safe to drink, smells like raw sewage, and in some places, emerges from the faucet with dark sediment. While the water purification system is a perfectly well-intended solution — and the people are no doubt better off than they would be without it — they cannot enjoy truly improved living standards without education, conservation, and cultural change.
Without the fundamental building block of society — education — my students are destined to live lives that mirror those of their mothers' generation: raising large families and cooking tortillas. Without education, they cannot build self-reliant communities with adequate medical care, proper housing, a safe water supply, and all the other elements of the developed world.
While the other volunteers and I were traveling through the countryside, we decided that there are a number of essential images of Guatemalan life, moments that truly capture what life here is like. As a result of Guatemala's huge indigous community, many (especially women) still wear traje, the traditional Mayan dress of long woven skirts, elaborate embroidered blouses, and ornate sashes. Walking through the streets of Guatemala City, one constantly encounters women in complete Mayan dress sipping bottles of Coca Cola and munching on Dominos pizza. When exploring the small villages that surround Lake Atitlan, we saw a Mayan woman washing her clothes against the rocks on the shores of the Lake (as nearly all women do), with a child strapped to her back in traditional fabrics. She had a basket of her family's laundry in one hand, a cell phone in other other, chattering away in an indigenous language. Like much of the developing world, Guatemala is in transition. Status symbols, like cell phones and Nike sneakers, take precedence over proper education. Children's teeth rot because their bottles are filled more cheaply with Pepsi than milk, and plans to improve the country's infrastructure are stalled by a sluggish economy and corrupt government. In many respects, the people of Guatemala have inherited many of the vices of the developed world with few of its virtues.
One wonders whether it is even possible to gradually bring about change and build sustainable communities while leaving treasured traditions and societal structures intact. Certainly, all the English teachers, housing projects, water purification systems, medical clinics, and agriscience experts in the world could improve their living standards, but at what cost?
Emma Fawcett, formerly an intern at World Hunger Year, is a volunteer teacher of English in Guatemala.
