African students show way on importance of education

NDONGA, CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC — This remote village doesn’t have an official school, and there’s no functioning government to build one. So the villagers, desperate to improve their children’s lives, used branches and leaves to construct their own dirt-floor schoolhouse.

It has no electricity, windows or desks, and it doesn’t keep out rain or beetles, but it does imbue hope, discipline and dreams. The 90 pupils sitting on bamboo benches could tutor world leaders about the importance of education — even if the kids struggle with the most basic challenges.

“It’s hard to learn without a paper or pen,” Bertrand Golbé, a parent who turned himself into a teacher, acknowledged with a laugh. “But this is the way we have to do it.

“They never have had breakfast when they arrive,” Golbé added. “They’re hungry. It’s difficult.”

Yet the students do learn, here in one of the poorest countries in the world: They spoke French with me, and some were doing real geometry when I happened to drop in. One student, Doria Seleyanca, 13, said that his father had been killed in the warfare that has engulfed Central African Republic for 14 years, and his family doesn’t have much. “I eat one meal a day,” he explained stoically.

Doria said he wanted to grow up to be a teacher — and he knew that an education was the only ticket to a better life.

“Tragically, aid to education has been falling since 2010,” says Julia Gillard, a former Australian prime minister who now leads the Global Partnership for Education, an international effort to support schooling in poor countries.

The U.S. has invested enormously in the military toolbox to reshape the world, but it has systematically underinvested in the education toolbox. The trade-offs are substantial: For the cost of deploying one U.S. soldier abroad for a year, we can start at least 20 schools.

The paradox is that education has been a huge global success. Until the 1960s, a majority of humanity had always been illiterate; now, fewer than 15 percent of adults worldwide are.

But now we’ve run into something of a global crisis: 60 million elementary school-age children remain out of school, and tens of millions more go to school but don’t learn a thing. That’s because schools in poor countries frequently are abysmal, suffering from corruption and inefficiency. Teachers routinely don’t show up — and are paid anyway — or are only barely literate themselves. Progress can’t involve simply pouring more money into broken systems.

The World Bank found that only 0.3 percent of teachers in Mozambique have the minimum knowledge needed to teach, along with 0.1 percent of teachers in Madagascar. In Niger, it’s just plain 0 percent.

In dysfunctional schools, students don’t learn. In Uganda, only 10 percent of fourth-graders can read a simple paragraph, the World Bank says. In Mozambique, fewer than half can add single-digit numbers. And in South Sudan, a girl is more likely to die in childbirth than to graduate from high school.

Yet done right, education can be transformative. The evidence suggests that it reduces extremism, empowers women, and promotes development; for the same reason terrorists blow up schools, we should build them.