We watched this video in training the other day, and I think it does a great job of laying out the facts about education here in the DR. Unfortunately, it is in Spanish, so here are some main points (not in the order that they are presented in the video):
1. Lack of schools. There are no preschools for 70% of kids less than 6 years old, and no high schools for 60% of adolescents!
2. Lack of time in school. Schools in the DR operate with “tandas,” which are different sessions throughout the day. There are morning (8AM-12PM), afternoon (2PM-5PM), and evening (6PM-9PM) tandas. Each lasts 3-4 hours. Most students only attend one tanda. You do the math! Although the law states that students should be in school for a minimum of 5 hours a day, most students are only actually learning for 2.5 hours! That’s not enough time to learn much…
3. Lack of teachers. Which results in overworked and underpaid existing teachers, who end up having to teach all 3 tandas! That’s a long workday, for hardly any money and with very little support.
4. Lack of facilities/materials in general. Classrooms, books, markers, chalkboards, libraries, outdoor space, bathrooms… you name it, they probably don’t have much of it, or any at all. Knowing that you won’t be able to use a bathroom is a very real reason to just skip school some days…
5. This video doesn’t even talk about teaching style, but the way that things are taught also does a disservice to the Dominican people! DR education is a “banking system” – teachers tell students information, and they are expected to regurgitate it. Critical thinking is not exactly cultivated… Can we blame teachers for this? Not really, because they went through the same school system, often only have a high school degree, and are overworked and underpaid!
Out of all the kids who enter into the school system (so that’s not even counting the ones who never go to school) only 63% reach 8th grade. Only 48% finish high school. Less than HALF of the population finishes high school! And if you are lucky/motivated enough to make it that far, the chance of going to university is still pretty slim. The higher in the education system you go, the farther you have to travel for school, and the more money it costs. This causes lots of kids to drop out – they have to work for their families, they can’t pay the bus fare every day, or they simply don’t see the point of going to school. And can you blame them, when they aren’t supported and they aren’t learning much anyway?
The biggest thing missing from the education system: money, of course. While the U.S. spends about $6000 per student per year, the DR spends less than $500! We have our problems too, obviously, but the DR is just ridiculous. The 1997 Law of Education states that at least 4% of their GDP is supposed to go into education, but in reality only 1.8% (or less?) actually does. The only country in Latin America that puts less into their education system is Ecuador. Most other countries invest around 5% or more of their GDP into education (according to the video).
Conclusion: the DR education system is failing miserably. And adult illiteracy isn’t even really measured, because the “measurement” of literacy is based on writing your name. So… you can write your name? You’re literate! With that test, I think somewhere around 80-90% of the country is “literate.” I don’t know where the real percentage falls, but I would guess more like 50%. Or less. Reading isn’t something that people do for fun around here.
This country is pretty chaotic. People don’t do much critical thinking. And while I definitely can't change the system, maybe I can change the teaching styles of a few educators, and help a few more people become literate... a little bit could go a very long way.
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