In which I have Thoughts, Opinions, and Possibly Attitudes about the Tanzanian Educational System

The Tanzanian government likes tests.  Likes them so much, in fact, that it has mandatory national exams, some of which determine whether or not a student graduates regardless of any other work that student has done and some of which are just for funsies.  I am at the college used for the marking of such, which means that all the people learning how to teach have just lost slightly more than a month out of only a 2 year curriculum.  This means I am not teaching or integrating into the community, but hanging out by myself in a room full of electronic equipment.  Sometimes monkeys stare at me.

I actually have way too much to do right now because I am pathologically incapable of saying no to requests to fix this, that, and the other thing, and I know you just left, but can you come back and do this urgent thing?  This is, however, not the point.

The government is pushing computer education in schools.  Good on them!  I think this is a highly worthy goal.  Computers and education are something that the government itself really needs.  Suppose, for example, you go to a police station to report a robbery, because you are a good responsible citizen interested in justice and also you need a police report in order to be issued a new atm card from the bank.  So you go to a police station, you answer the curt questions of name, age, religion, and tribe, stuff is written down in  a giant ledger, a small piece of notebook paper with cryptic numbers indicating your reports location (there are huge stacks of giant ledgers everywhere) is given to you, along with a police report form, which you take across the street and make copies of at your own expense, after which you bring the copies (and original) back to the police station and hand some person the forms and the small piece of notebook paper.  The person uses the numbers in the notebook paper to go look at the ledger, write down the information from the ledger on the copies of the police report form you just made, and then you pay an additional fee to get an official rubber stamp placed on the form.  As a good and responsible citizen, I would never consider just getting my own rubber stamp made and keeping an additional blank copy of the form just to save hassle on possible subsequent occasions.  The reason I bring all this up is because this is a system begging to be computerized.   If nothing else, hard drives take up a lot less space and are more sanitary than giant piles of moldering and cobwebby ledgers, and are easier to search.     Having computers easily available would help retail a great deal.  There are places in the world where making change is not a huge issue because there is a computerized thingie that tells people how much change to give and there is a well organized container of cash with which to make change.  This computerized thingie is also a convenient way of keeping records of cash flow, just kind of as a side thing, but I never realized until I came here just how amazing it is to have the infrastructure in places such that one can buy $1.36 worth of stuff with a $20 bill and be assured of getting the correct change, right then immediately.  If one even uses cash, which as a general rule, I don't in the US, because we live in the future where bits of plastic can be used instead because even small business owners have credit card readers.  

Anyway, computers are good.  The problem is not getting the physical computers--people love throwing money for computers at Africa, which is good, everything has to start with a little money being tossed around--the problem is having any kind of realistic computer education.  There was an Irish group that just gave 7 computers to a primary school close to me, good on them!  God love the Irish, but they left before teaching anyone at the school how to use, much less teach computers.  This is a problem.  There are schools around Tanzania with piles of unused and dusty computers because there is no one to take care of them or use them to teach.  There is an official computer curriculum which is, as far as I can tell, useless.  As in, the other day I got an urgent phone call from a teacher at my college wanting to know how to find the server's IP address, because, while he is a highly educated computer teacher, there is nothing in the computer education that would prepare anyone to do anything to do that.  (In all fairness,  looking up a server's IP is a little more confusing than looking up the IP on your personal computer.)  Not that I've actually had a chance to teach, but I did observe a few classes before all of them were canceled for the grading of national exams.  Great weight is placed on students' ability to memorize categories of computers (there are many ways to place computers into category, the official syllabus picked size), the definition of a computer (which I disagree with), and the difference between data and information (which I'm not sure I know either).  There is also great emphasis placed on being able to use Microsoft Office products.  And by use, I mean work technically.  Personally, I think time teaching office software would be better spent teaching people how to type and how to actually give presentations, but who am I to argue with the demands of power point?  

All education has to start somewhere, and it's not like the majority of power point users in developed countries know how to use it to give a good presentation either, but there needs to be more and different stuff than what there is.  I recommend:

• Games.  Typing games would probably be the easiest to sell to the ministry of education, but I am a great believer in computer familiarity via Minesweeper, Solitaire, and Oregon Trail.  

• Hardware/maintenance education.  Teach people what is inside a computer, how to take care of it, why dust and water should be kept away from them, troubleshooting, and general guides to keeping a computer just plain running.

• What's inside the box.  How a computer actually works, by which I mean files, file systems, the navigation therethrough, the basics of the huge complicated mess which is networking, operating systems and how to reinstall them if you screw things all to Dijkstra in your dedication to learning through experimentation, etc.  The great thing about people who have never touched a computer before is they aren't scared of it.  Tell people in the US to open a console or a terminal and type ipconfig/ifconfig and they freak out about the scary black box, and having to, like, type actual commands. Tell people in Tanzania to do the same thing and they just do it, because they aren't scared of it, and also the culture of Tanzania is one in which people do not brag about a lack of math and computer skills the way they do in the US (what's with that, anyway?).    

That's pretty much it, because there is limited time in the curriculum and computer classes often don't happen, but I think this is probably the important stuff for being able to keep the computer functioning and being familiar enough with it to be able to kind of figure out the rest.    Discussions of security and ethics and information and photo editing and stuff are great, but let's leave that until we have a functional infrastructure of computer education.  There are people here who know how to get on facebook but have no idea how to turn a computer on, and this I find problematic.