Educational Culture in Guatemala
Piet Bess
“We educate the child [/boy] that we need not punish the man.”
-painted in large letters across the front of a school in San Andres, Petén
While in Guatemala in the Summer of 2002, I took a look at the country from the perspective of building and maintaining literacy, as well as in terms of a bilingual, social bifurcated culture. During my stay there, I visited a couple of schools, briefly assessed the literacy of the adults and children I met, talked with teachers, looked for whatever libraries I could find, and looked for books in homes. I also found a book on bilingual education, Educando en nuestros idiomas, advocating a model of bilingual education like the model we use in California. The book suggested a model in which literacy in the indigenous languages is supported, while Spanish as a second language is gradually introduced as the student progresses. The indigenous languages include those of the Maya group and other highland indigenous language groups, as well as the language of the Afro-indigenous group on the Atlantic coast.It was very interesting, but did not seem to have a lot to do with things on the ground in Antigua and in the village of San Andres, Petén where I was a Spanish student.
Antigua is a very rich place for that country. It attracts not only comparatively rich gringos like me, but also members of the Guatemalan and El Salvadorian upper classes. It can be difficult to tell the rich Central Americans and the Norteńos apart. San Andres is in the huge northern province of Petén, area of internal settlement, deforestation, and, slowly, budding ecological consciousness. A very happening, exciting locale in the global scheme of things. An utterly stultifying place in the local scheme of things.
I met a five-year old boy in the family where I stayed in Antigua who could not identify an “N”*. His family is not dysfunctional in terms of, say, alcohol or some other indicator. His family eats well and has a roof [and an internet computer]. When I brought a children’s book, a Guatemalan classic called Barbuchin, he and his sister set on it—and me to read it to them—like mosquitoes on a nice fat tourist. The book promptly disappeared. He had hidden it to keep it. [I ended up leaving it as a gift.]
*At the time I wrote this, 7 yrs. ago, I thought this was very low literacy. Now, after teaching Kindergarten for 5 years, I have re-assessed. Also, I have learned that not every country's Kinder curriculum or Kinder starting age is the same.
I found a library of sorts in Antigua. It was one of the ubiquitous recycled US schoolbuses that abound there, full of books donated from The North
[see http://www.probigua.conexion.com/jmpen.htm#Support_libraries]. San Andres boasts a children’s library partly supported by the school I attended, with decent books from Northern donations
[http://www.geocities.com/vivalaselva/]. In response, the local government, the municipio, has set up a library of sorts. It is a library in that it consists of a locale, and some bound publications are in fact located there. Otherwise, it lacks everything that makes a library a library. Needless to say there is cable TV in town.
Schools there rely on rote learning. I sat in on a class of 4th grade girls. These may well be a year younger than 4th graders here. I estimate on my limited sample that they were reading at what would be the 2nd grade level here. The teacher sat behind her desk while directing the class. So that is what the teachers’ desk was originally for!!!! The students were to recite a rhyme from memory. Alone. Where we in the North talk about hopefully lowering the affective filter [making the student feel OK, so he is able to learn], they were intentionally raising it. We waited while a 4th grader grinned and twisted her hands, wordlessly building up the nerve to recite. I suppose this took a minute or 90 seconds. Here is the rhyme:
| El ronron Justino, Es el capitan, De un barco Argentino, Llamada “El Sultan.” | El ronron Justino, Es un aleman, Come tocino, Caviar y champan!* |
*Justin the cockroach is the captain of an Argentian ship called The Sultan. Justin the cockroach is a German who eats bacon, caviar and champagne!
If anyone can think of a purpose to this rhyme, I would certainly like to know what it might be! After everyone had struggled through this, it was time to read the next nonsense selection aloud. They were to go to the front of the room, read it out of the book, and, this time, for practice, they were to do it in pairs. Boy-oh-boy! The idea of reciting in pairs had girls finding partners in a nonce, and the raised hands volunteering to read next showed a wildfire of enthusiasm. Apparently, doing stuff with a friend is a strongly motivating force with these girls.
I asked why the students were subjected to this difficult thing, standing alone and reciting, when it was so emotionally difficult for them. What purpose did it serve? I was told that it was because it is difficult for them. It would prepare them for public speaking, or so. My philosophy of education is at odds with this practice.
Interestingly, I saw no overt tools of classroom management, such as rules, or ways of tracking their violation, such as names written on the board. The closest I saw to this was a kid being lightly cuffed once for doing sloppy work, a practice very much out of step with current Northern methods.
The teachers in Antigua acted oddly during recess. The hung out, kicked their heels, and shot the breeze. You watch me at break, and you’ll see me goin’ nuts, just workin’ like mad. Not so there. A perhaps related phenomenon is the fact that I was there when there were about a third of the kids at school. The last week had had Monday off, Father’s Day, [always the 17th of June]. The coming Monday there was to be no school—Army Day [not widely, uh, festive for most there!]. I was in this school on a Friday, the only day this school was in session that week. Some kids had come, seen that there were few others in attendance, and gone home. Local schools had anywhere from one to four days off that week. The occasion? Teachers’ Day! Hearsay reports from Matt, a gringo who does environmental ed. with schools in Petén [http://www.volunteerpeten.com] suggest that teachers often don’t show up, and that substitutes are not utilised. He tells of shortened schoolweeks, where teachers are supposed to, but in fact do not, attend workshops. He indicates that the work ethic is lackadaisical.
Schools in Petén are built different than the one I saw in Antigua. Petén is much hotter, and walls and windows are optional. I visited a country classroom of 20 kids from 2nd grade to fifth, though some seemed to be young adults. The first graders were being handled by a student teacher in a different class. He was spending about 10 minutes a piece one on one with kids dictating things for them to write down. His time was largely wasted with that one, and not at all used by the other 12 kids.
Here’s an example of what was being taught to 5th graders. Words with the accent on the last syllable [lección, población] are “aguda”. Words with the accent on the penultimate syllable [arbol, como] are “grave”. Words with the accent on the antepenultimate syllable [miércoles] are “esdrújula”. “Esdrújula” is itself an esdrújula.
One asks himself often what academic skills in our sense of the phrase the kids learn. It is easy to see, however, what they do lay a great value on. In almost every classroom I visited there, the national symbols were displayed. These include the [essentially extinct] quetzal, the national tree, the flag, national seal, etc. Sometimes a Mayan military leader [whose name escapes me] is displayed in coloring-book quality art. Sometimes there is the national instrument, the marimba, which sounds to me not that different from merry-go-round music. Odd priorities.
At the country school outside San Andres, I started talking to one 3rd grader who was having trouble with math. She would not talk to me[incidentally, this is one way the Maya had of dealing with the conquistadors, according to a history I read], so I backed off a bit, and added encouragement where I could. At break, the teacher showed some amusement at the fact that I was talking to this kid. She hardly speaks any Spanish! Well, I felt that this would have been useful information during class. After break, I returned to working with the kid using the tools you use in this situation, supporting the words with concrete demonstration. Sitting there at break, I asked the teacher, a young, literate woman with several years experience teaching experience how she dealt with kids from Maya speaking families. She gave me a little Mona Lisa smile and shrugged.
Another teacher, who teaches in a village even more isolated and poorer than San Andres, when asked how he taught Castilian [his word] to children from families that speak indigenous languages, replied blithely, “Ya saben,” “They already know.” How horrendously callous.
Perhaps some of this could be understood by attending the Magisterio, which I was given to understand was a teachers’ college. This is high school, and high school I guess is what you have to take to be a teacher. First of all, the students have to wear catholic school-type uniforms. This looked pretty demeaning in the case of the 45 year old mother there finishing her schooling. There seems to be the idea that if it ain’t got a uniform, it can’t possibly be a school, though the one-room rural school did not have them. At Magisterio, I sat in on an ecology class, a half hour lecture. There was no reference to previous lessons. The lecture outlined the local deforestation problem, and set forth the necessity for consciousness raising. The lecturer made the point that foreign tourists do not litter as much as Guatemalan ones at Tikal, the nearby World Heritage Site. During the lecture, there was no hand raised, no question asked. At this point, it began to dawn on me what it meant that there were 15 or 20 churches in this town of maybe 4,000. They are a rather well-opiated mass.
I was expecting that there would be few physical resources. The schools in Guatemala are poor. At first, I thought what a pity it is that what is most sorely lacking is just information, mere philosophy. All we need to do is transform people’s thinking. All we need is people on two ends of a log talking to each other, communicating the ideas that are needed to teach this country’s future, its youth. But isn’t information the most expensive resource of all?
