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CERCular: No.1 of 1998
Articles
Children with Special Needs: Learning from BRAC
Peter Mittler
In November 1997, CERC's Peter Mittler went to Bangladesh at the invitation by the Asian Federation forMentalHandicap. While there, he looked at the work of the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC). This article highlights a new BRAC initiative for disadvantaged children.
Bangladesh may be among the poorest countries of the world, but it is rich in creative innovation. One reflection of that creativity is in the work of BRAC.
BRAC is one of the largest non-governmental organisations in the world. Founded in 1971, it employs 18,000 staff who work in the most disadvantaged communities. Nearly two million people in 54,000 villages have been helped by means of micro-credit schemes to develop income-generating projects such as poultry farming, beekeeping, carpentry, growing maize and vegetables, and fish farming. One of BRAC's major achievements has been to teach 13 million women to make up the oral rehydration solution needed to combat diarrhoea. Lessons learned from this project have been extended to family planning, water and sanitation, immunisation, health and nutrition education, and basic curative services at village level.
During my visit to Bangladesh, I was particularly impressed by BRAC's nonformal primary education project. BRAC employs 33,000 teachers, mostly women, to work with 1.2 million children. These children are aged eight to eleven, and 70 per cent are girls. Classrooms are basic, and the children commonly sit on the floor in a horseshoe, with the teacher at the end of the room but able to move freely up and down to help individual children. The curriculum covers the first three years of primary education. It includes literacy and numeracy, but is strongly linked to the needs of the local community. Parents are part of the lives of the schools. Peer tutoring is a strong feature of the system, and children in difficulty receive help from those sitting next to them. The drop out rate is one fifth of that of government schools, and 85 per cent of the children graduate to year 4 of the state schools. An itinerant supervisor visits each teacher once a week, helping with assessment, curriculum and lesson planning, and providing ongoing support, mentoring, consultancy and continuing training through joint problem-solving.
I was especially interested to learn about BRAC's plan to admit one or two children with mental retardation to 2,500 of its schools over a five-year period. Implementation will begin with 30 schools in the first year, and then scale up to 170, 300, 1,000 and finally 2,500 schools. The project is being undertaken in partnership with the Society for the Care and Education of the Mentally Retarded, which will provide training and support for the supervisors.
The project offers an accessible curriculum, small classes, built-in support from peers, and strong parental involvement. In these circumstances, the inclusion of children seems to be less problematic than in some other Asian societies, including Hong Kong. Perhaps even prosperous societies can learn lessons from BRAC.
Balancing Tradition and Modernity in Bhutan
Peter Steyn
CERC's Peter Steyn is a frequent visitor to Bhutan — a small, poor, remote, beautiful, landlocked state which is sandwiched between China and India in the Himalaya mountains. This article highlights some of the tensions faced by Bhutanese decision-makers in the education sector.
The tourist literature views Bhutan more as a museum than as a nation in rapid social change. This is understandable, not only because the concept is marketable but also because Bhutan does retain a unique Buddhist culture of a type that has been lost elsewhere. But for the country's social planners, this mix of old and new creates major dilemmas.
During the last three and a half decades, Bhutan's education system has placed strong emphasis on English as the medium of instruction, even from the pre-primary level. This might surprise readers in Hong Kong and elsewhere, because Bhutan was never colonised by the British (or by any other power). Until the early 1960s, schooling was conducted primarily in Hindi. However Bhutan's king desired to assert the place of Bhutan in the international arena, and recognised the importance of English in this goal. Accordingly, in 1962 the king announced that English would be used in place of Hindi.
Various lobbies have over the years advocated the use of Bhutanese languages. In 1961, Dzongkha was designated the national language, and it is now a compulsory subject in all schools. However, Dzongkha is only the mother tongue of a segment of the population, and 20 other mother tongues are spoken in the country. Moreover, Dzongkha is a complex language, especially in its written form which uses the Tibetan script. A move to a complete Dzongkha-medium curriculum would therefore be a major undertaking.
During a visit at the end of 1997, I spoke with Tenzin Chhoeda in the Ministry of Health & Education. I wanted to learn more from him about the detailed study he had conducted with Mark Bray in 1994, with UNICEF support, about future plans for primary education. He spoke about the constant tension between quantity and quality. Bhutan seeks to raise its primary school enrolment rates from their present level of about 70 per cent; but it wishes to avoid the serious qualitative decline which has been experienced by most other countries in similar circumstances. Bhutan is already faced by shortages of teachers, and excessive expansion would create major problems for the system.
To some extent, the planners seem to be succeeding. Among the positive aspects that I observed was a change in the students on the streets of Thimphu, the capital. Even primary-school children in Thimphu were willing to approach me, and could converse in English which was so fluent that they were clearly thinking as well as speaking in the language. I wondered how Hong Kong children in the same age group would view their Bhutanese counterparts; and I wondered what the Hong Kong policy-makers, who have recently been embroiled in acrimonious debate, would say about the balance between mother tongue and imported language.
Dr Kinzang Dorji, Speaker of the House of Assembly, stressed to me his concern for 'Diglam Chosim': the essential code of behaviour and the relationship between the state and the people in everyday life. Like others, he argued that Bhutan's entry to the 21st century must include ambition tempered with prudence, and must embrace the best elements of its unique culture. Among the challenges is to shape values in an education system which on the one hand uses a foreign language as the principal medium of instruction but which on the other hand asserts national values. The extent to which Bhutanese leaders will succeed in balancing modernisation with cultural preservation will be a matter for outsiders as well as Bhutanese to watch carefully.
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