Private Schools For The Poor

WHEN PRESIDENT Obama visited Ghana last week, he went to teach. Africans could harness education “to create new wealth,” said the president. “Yes you can.”

But what if Africa has something to teach the president about education?

For decades we have taught Africa that it needs to copy the West’s model of free, compulsory education. Everyone knows that he poor can’t afford to pay for education. And anyway, there are some parents who don’t understand the importance of education.

But now we know that what we knew just isn’t true. In his new book, The Beautiful Tree:A personal journey into how the world’s poorest people are educating themselves, James Tooley shows from his comprehensive research, that the Third World poor can teach us a lot about education. Because in the Third World the poor are educating themselves, with their own money, in spite of a dysfunctional government education system, meddling regulators, and ideology-driven international development experts.

Tooley’s journey began in Hyderabad, India, in 2000, on an auto-rickshaw ride from his “posh hotel... to the Charminar, the triumphal arch” built in 1591 and now located in the middle of the Hyderbad slums. All along the route, in the middle-class suburbs, Tooley was struck by the number the signboards advertising private schools.

But the signboards continued into the heart of the slums.

For the stunning thing was that private schools had not thinned out as we went from one of the poshest parts of town to the poorest... I was amazed, but also confused: why had no one I’d worked with in India told me about them?

After a couple of inquiries, Tooley found himself in the tiny office of the owner of the Royal Grammar School, an “English-medium” school in the heart of the slums. “English-medium” means that all the classes are conducted in English—in the middle of an Indian slum.

I was introduced to the warm, kind, and quietly charismatic Mr. Fazalur Rahman Khurrum and to a huge network of private schools in the slums and low-income areas of the Old City.

The reason that nobody had told him about these schools is that nobody knew about them. Private schools are for the rich, he was told by experts all over the world.

But when Tooley told the development experts about his discovery he was in for a shock. They didn’t want to know. These schools were selective, they were no good, they were “untenable in modern educational theory;” they were crammers, “ripping off the poor.”

But Tooley found similar schools, thousands of them, in the Makoko slums of Lagos, Nigeria, and in Ghana, and Kenya. There were even private schools for the poor in the remote areas of China.

Nobody was going to believe his anecdotal evidence, so Tooley obtained funding to test 24,000 school children from all types of schools in Africa, India and China. His results were unequivocal. Except in China, the unrecognized slum schools out-performed government schools by a wide margin. They performed only a little below the regulated private schools for the middle class.

There is no mystery about this. Regulated or not, the slum schools work because there is a chain of accountability. “[P]oor parents [are] keen education consumers.” School owners must deliver to their fee-paying customers. They must offer the programs that parents want, and they must deliver results in the government school qualifications exams. And they do.

One thing parents want in India is “English-medium” instruction.

In Hyderabad, 88 percent of recognized and 80 percent of unrecognized private unaided schools reported they were English medium, compared with fewer than 1 percent of government schools.

Why the difference? In India, the politicians and the experts have decided that children in government schools must be taught in their mother tongue, and not the language preferred by parents.

“Never trust experts,” said British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury over a century ago. You can see why. When James Tooley took his findings on the road to conferences of education and development experts he ran into a road block. In fact a professor of education in Britain took Tooley aside after one talk.

He was trying to be helpful. “You’re very silly, saying all of that. You’ll never get another job. Be sensible, old chap.”

Well, of course. If people were competent to educate their children who would need experts?

So Tooley has heard it all. Private education for the poor woutd lead to the death of government education. It would be a “market failure” because parents wouldn’t choose education “of the right sort.” The education wouldn’t be “pro-poor.” Try this one. Education is a human right, and thus must be free and compulsory. And of course, everyone knows that universal education in the West was achieved by government not the market.

If this sounds familiar, it is because we have all heard before. Our liberal friends use these arguments to justify their power, not just in education, but in all aspects of the welfare state. Tooley uses an entire chapter to argue against them.

For if James Tooley is right, and the poor are perfectly able to direct and fund the education of their children without supervision, then what is the point of government education, or even government health care, or the rest of the welfare state, except as a patronage system.

The liberal one-size-fits-all solution to education is a stark contrast to the authentic approach preferred by the Third World poor. The liberal solution is long on jobs for liberals, long on expensive facilities and short on accountability. Third World education of the poor, by the poor, and for the poor is different. It is long on jobs for the poor, short on expensive facilities and long on accountability.

Maybe President Obama should not be offering help to Africa, but offering to learn from Africa.

For instance, he and his advisers could consider that, in those ramshackle Third World private schools for the poor, they typically provide about ten percent of the places free for the children of the poorest of the poor.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

print view

To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.

To email the author, click here.

TAGS

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

mysql close