Imagine a school system where.....
Students only go to school for 4 hours a day. The school day lasts from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. and then 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. but only certain grades meet in the morning and others in the afternoon.
And in that 4 hours a day, school begins with a flag ceremony which usually starts 15 minutes late, and then halfway through a 30 minute recess is taken, and then 15 minutes before school ends, the students have to clean up the school grounds. How much time are we down to... 3 hours??
And in that 3 hours, the students sit in concrete classrooms in wooden desks, in some schools without fans in the 100 degree heat. The teacher comes to the front of the classroom and begins writing the day's lesson on the board in perfect handwriting, using a ruler to make her lines. Oops, she messed up.. Better erase and start over. In the meantime, students are expected to sit quietly at their desks. Once the teacher finishes her lesson, with the interruption of yelling at the kids 3 times, the students begin their day's work of copying into their notebooks the information the teacher wrote on the board. They too must write in perfect script, and when they are finished, they show it to the teacher. For the ones who finish early, they are either expected to keep sitting quietly or in some cases, they are allowed to go running in and out of the classroom and around the school. And those that don't finish... well, I don't know what they do to be honest. Rarely is a teacher willing to stay after school and where else can that student get the information but in that aula (classroom)?
Imagine a school system where....
Teachers studied for 3 years out of 9th grade but instead of studying teaching methods and child psychology, they are only required to take higher level general education classes.
Directores (principals) and supervisores (superintendents) rose to the top not through merit but through connections and social status.
If your parents can't afford the school uniform, you can't go to school.
Some schools don't have bathrooms let alone fans.
The school cantina (snack center) sells fried empanadas, lollipops, and chocolate cookies to a society that is already deprived of nutritious foods.
Students enter speaking mainly Guarani (Jopara really, a mix of Guarani and Spanish), but the teachers teach only in Spanish. Then when students get to 6th grade (if they make it that far), they have Guarani class, which teaches the pure, old Guarani.
The poor student with head lice and is always dirty has to sit in the back, and the #1 student, which is ranked starting in elementary school, is invited to do everything - sit in the front, change the flag, walk in the community parade.
Boys play soccer all recess while girls are almost forced to sit and giggle and gossip. Their uniforms are skirts for Christ's sake! Try playing in that!
90% of the rural population of Paraguay has intestinal parasites, and instead of preventing, treating, or even acknowledging these illnesses, students have to carry on in school even with their symptoms.
A majority of the mouths of a majority of the children are filled with cavities. Some so painful that they can't even open their mouths.
Textbooks and storybooks are hard to come by, and even when a school has a library, the teachers don't want to lend the books out because they want to keep them safe and nice.
All of the posters in the classroom, if there are any, are in English because the same poster doesn't exist in Spanish or Guarani.
Lower socioeconomic schools (Title 1 in the US), which happen to be pretty much all schools, are supposed to receive free milk and bread from the government, but the further you get from Asuncion, the less likely you are going to get your milk.
If a child has special needs, they do not go to school.
Most parents only have a basic education level and work in the house and on the farm.
If a boy is good enough, he could play in the local semi-professional soccer league and make more money and have a more relaxed lifestyle than any other job.
If it rains, school is canceled. While schools are expected to have 180 days, my technical trainer said last year she doesn't think they even had 100.
These are all problems that plague the Paraguayan school system. What's even scarier to me is to think about the kind of society that this educational system creates...
Another thing to think about... In training, we were given the following statistic: On the United Nations Human Development Index, which is a global measurement of the quality of life and access to basic needs, out of 182 countries, Paraguay is ranked #101. The rural areas of Paraguay is comparable to Kenya, which is ranked #147. Asuncion, the capital, is comparable to Israel, which is ranked #27. Something seems wrong, doesn't it??
