| Subject: Re: Why so many school drop outs? - Root cause identified! |
Author:
mazit
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Date Posted: 09:14:49 05/13/05 Fri
In reply to:
mangitbay
's message, "Re: Why so many school drop outs? - Root cause identified!" on 10:13:58 01/25/05 Tue
Thanks mangitbay,
You have amply demonstrated the responsibilities of the individual student and the parents for the individual student to succeed in her/his education. I totally agree with you. I also think that in PNG, more immediate factors influencing the dropout are policies, infrastructure, school facilities, and teachers' abilities.
In terms of policies, the PNG system of education has a policy of no class repeats. Second, student performance are graded by norm reference,i.e. use of normal statistical normal curves so that a small proportion of students get the highest and lowest grade scores while the majority between the two extreme scores get middle or average scores.
In terms of infrastructure, this inovles basics such as transportation (land, sea, air), electricity, and communication (postal, telephone,e-mail), which are outside the control of the students, teachers, parents, and the school. Adequate provision of these infrastructure will help in controlling costs of education enterprise in rural communities in PNG.
In terms of school facilities, most schools in the country are rundown with shortage of text and exercise books and other stationaries, desks, board & chalk,teachers' accommodation, classrooms, lighting, etc. I find it hard to understand how sharing of text books among students who don't live together at home will help their learning with parental help at home. Texts are hard to copy in most schools in rural PNG with no electricity, no photocopying facilities, and among rural non-monetized communities who can't afford to pay for copies even if photocopying facilities were available in school. Most rural homes do not have special settings to promote home studies.
In terms of teachers themselves, recruitment of student teachers are not always done on academic grounds particularly in a few of the church run schools. Many secondary school finishers with top grades choose teaching only as a second, or third option while a majority who choose teaching as first option are average students (grades). So, teacher output from colleges may not be as well prepared to respond to the specific needs of students they receive in their schools so that needs of individual students who may need more or specific attention are overlooked by attention mostly to the class as a whole. This is exacerbated by the shortage of classrooms and teachers so that in many schools in the country one can find classes of up to between 45 to 60 students in a class. In many cases teachers with little knowledge of how to teach english, maths, science, or other specific subjects are asked to teach in areas in which they have little knowledge or lack the qualification to impart such specific knowledge areas.
These may sound all negative but the positive that I see is that, despite these barriers, a proportion of those who pass through these schools get to go beyond the village school experience to boarding high schools with a few even making it through to tertiary level education and competency-based education/training.
In my time, there were a few of us who were in school so most of us passed through to secondary and tertiary. Today, the student population at all levels has increased while facilities have marginally increased so that the demand for schooling is more than the supply of education. I guess this is not unique to PNG; it is a situation common to most developing countries the world over.
I would be happy to hear your views.
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