honduran education system

I wrote the following bit when I was in the last place and wasn´t able to post it, so here it is:




I’ve been thinking quite often of the day care centers that I worked at in my AmeriCorps program last year. In fact, every day.

Since I arrived here in Honduras, I’ve slowly realized how the form of my intuition has shaped—it’s really been due to you. Let me explain: almost everything here goes against my intuition. Of course there are the cows and chickens that roam the streets, the trash all over the ground, etc. that causes some serious health concerns, but the way in which we see and treat children at a place like CHDCC is almost like an unknown universe here.

The host family that I am living with now is one example. My mother has three children, two are 10 and 12 years old and the 3rd is about 7 weeks old. I have been living here since the baby was just a few days old. Since I came, my mom has not breast fed her once, and when she does feed her, the baby is lying down in her rocker, without eye contact, without anyone paying attention to her—her bottle is propped up on a blanket. When I try to feed her and make eye contact she doesn’t seem to have any idea how to do so. Her father googoos and gagas her when he actually pays attention to her in a way that I couldn’t understand even if I did speak perfect Spanish. The family watches TV about 6 hours a day and hardly ever talks. The mother yells whenever she wants something.

And this isn’t even a “struggling” family by Honduran standards. I have asked the mother why she doesn’t breast feed and she said it is because the baby doesn’t like it, so I’m hoping there’s a good reason for example maybe the mother has HIV (though that’d be terrible) or the baby is allergic.

The children, especially the very young children, are absolutely adorable. My blonde hair fascinates them and once they get over their “pena” (hard to translate, but mostly translates as their initial shyness), they are quite inquisitive. They are, however, almost completely without creativity. As a matter of fact, one of my first days in the school I went with another volunteer who had coloring sheets to give them. I gently recommended that the children just use the white side of the paper so that they could draw what they wanted to without having to use the coloring sheet, which was Garfield. She laughed. Apparently she had tried that before, and every time, one or two children draw something and then the rest of the class just copies them.

When we handed out the Garfield sheets, (this is 1st grade, by the way), they all wanted the orange to color in Garfield. It took a very long time to explain that Garfield could be any color that they wanted, and still, almost every Garfield was orange. They also kept raising their hands to ask if their picture “was right.”

The children here are taught to just do exactly what everyone else is doing. Although it has supposedly gotten better over the last 20 years or so, the process of rote memorization is highly valued over the creative process. And so, our jobs as volunteers in the youth development sector have to focus on the process in place of the product. The terrible tragedy of this loss of creativity and this obsession with television has to be counteracted by some serious focus on the individual and their future—but this is all so much easier said than done. First of all, how can we explain to the little girls that they have just as much opportunity and right to become engineers or doctors if almost all of the engineers and doctors are men? And if almost all of their mothers work in the house?

My first host mother, much sweeter and more patient with her children, finished colegio (high school), which is fairly rare here, and even was accepted into university but could not afford it. And we’re not talking about a terribly expensive university.

The education system is in shambles. Teen pregnancy is high, the access to drugs in the big cities is very high, there’s a devastating lack of resources, lack of parental and teacher support (for example many parents do not care if their children attend school or not, and many teachers you’ll find outside of the classroom while as many as 70 students have free reign over a classroom), the lack of basic needs such as clothes, shoes and food make school a very challenging goal, a lack of role models for the children make it very hard to make and complete goals, the violence in the homes and the streets are very high risk factors for the children as well, there are abusive parents, an overwhelming amount of uneducated parents and teachers (you need only to complete high school to be a teacher), there is certainly a defeatist attitude among some children and teachers, and there is an unbelievable lack of opportunity. For example, I asked my host mother why it is that people who do not like their jobs almost always stay with them, and she answered that it’s because there’s no other option.

I met a boy named Brian in the park the other day, who asked my friends and I for money for churros (chips). We said no, of course, because we are not here to give money—we are here to help form sustainable resources for the people to continue their betterment with. I asked him a bit about himself: he’s eleven, hasn’t been in school for 3 years because he doesn’t know how to read or write, and has 7 brothers and sisters all school aged and yet only one is in school. I asked him if he wanted to read and write and he said yes. We looked at a map or Central America and I asked him about the letters of the countries and we spelled them all out. There are some volunteers here in Talanga in the Passionists group (I’m not sure the name exactly, but their Catholic and here for a year working with schools), who have a small library in their house for the kids to read and check out. I asked Brian if he’d come with me the next day to check one out, and he said that because his family is Evangelical. (“Christian” here), and not Catholic, he couldn’t. I told him I’d come the next day at noon to meet him and find a book anyway.

To my surprise, he was there the next day playing in the park, which is actually fairly nice and new, and I asked him if he was ready. He was still wearing the same dirty, town clothes, which actually appeared to be the classic white shirt/blue pants school uniform that all of the children wear here. He said he wanted to play for a while and I said I’d read on the bench until he was ready. About 20 minutes later he said that he needed to go and buy a pig for his family. I walked with him to buy the pig. About 10 minutes after he left to bring it to his family, the sky opened and it poured for an hour. I couldn’t find Brian and still haven’t seen him since.

The parents here that are uneducated seem to find it difficult to force their children to continue in school, or even care. This problems are similar to many problems in the US, however they are much more common here.

Here are some statistics from a man named Leonardo Valesquez, who works with the Honduran education system, and Sandra Gomez, the director of the Peace Corps Youth Development Program:
Honduran Population: 7.4 milion
Life expectancy: 66 years
4.07% Infant mortality rate
108/100,000 mortality rate for mothers
Chronic malnutrition: 36.4% in rural areas
70% of pop. is under 30 years old
25% of pop. is illiterate
Even in big cities, only 32% of youth play sports, 7% play music, 1% do scouts; and 34% do nothing after school
Only 87% of kids are registered/have birth certificates (many parents do not know that it is free or have no money to travel to obtain the birth certificate) If you do not have a brith certificate you may not access health centers.
Human Development Report puts Honduras as number 116 out of 177 countries in terms of wealth
60% of the population lives at a median income. This is about 2 dollars a day
The poorest working youth earn about 74$ per year
60% of children under 12 and 50% of adolescents live in poverty
1/5 Persons HIV Positive are between ages 12-18
Between 1985-1997 Honduras had 51.6% of HIV/AIDS cases in Central America, followed by Guatemala with 15%
20% of the population lives on a high-income level. This is between 2,061-5,269 $ per year
80% of the population of people ages 18-30 are not in school
Of people ages 18-30, 57% are working, and 43% are not working.
Out of the employed people, 46% are self-employed, and 12% are non-paid family workers
There is a lack of employability. This is not just for the uneducated—on average it takes 6 months out of college to find a job
92.3 % of migrants go the USA. This includes many valuable human resources that could do a lot for Honduras, however, either cannot find jobs here or can find much more money and opportunity in the states
Youth migrants: about 1 million per year
The 2nd or 3rd highest source of revenue for Honduras depending on whom you ask is remittances from the US. However, there are no programs built to help the people use this money effectively. While it does stimulate the economy, none of the money is saved or put into quality, long-term projects or hiring (1/5 of GDP is remittances primarily used for consumption)
Honduras GDP: 12.3 Billion US GDP: 13.8 Trillion
15% of crimes reported are investigated
1/5 Hondurans reported being a victim of a crime in 2006
There are 3 times as many private security guards than police officers in Honduras
Laws reward land use, not preservation
The US purchases 70% of Honduran exports
The law here says that public schools must have 200 days of school, however with “huelgas” or strikes, there ends up on average being 110 days of school. Also I have noticed personally that when the teachers need the school cleaned they will interrupt classes to have students come and clean. Also until 7th grade, children are only in school from 7:30 am until about noon, or from noon until 5. This includes about a 45-minute recess. And this is lucky, because out in the aldeas (little towns), some of my coworkers have told me that they are lucky if they even get 30 minutes of learning in one day.
It is “obligatory” by law to send children to school until 6th grade, but nothing happens to the parents if the children do not go to school
64% of the teachers here have at least 2 different grade levels in one classroom. Often they will have 6th and 1st grade together, for example, so the teacher can give the older kids an assignment while teaching the 1st graders. This leads to a lack of preparedness for high school which leads to even more dropouts
37% of Honduran schools have one teacher who teaches all grades in one classroom
35% of tax money in Honduras goes to teacher salaries (75% of all tax money for education), who still strike on a very regular basis for the money they have been promised. This is a hard situation that I’m slowly figuring out, but apparently a gentleman in effort to get more votes offered to raise teacher salaries to an almost impossible level and after being voted into the ministry of education realized that he could not do it and resigned, however the law remains in place.
There is a complete vertical, top to bottom organization in the educational system. The management is centralized, there is hardly any preschool coverage, there is a lack of community involvement because the communities see the government as completely responsible, and even when a community decides to make a change, they have to get it approved by the government, which is a difficult and tedious process. While “tenured” teachers always get paid and have great benefits, new, young and under contract teachers often times won’t be paid at all.

I am enjoying my time here, don´t get me wrong. And the Peace Corps discourages us from `ranting` on our blogs, but I don´t consider this ranting, I consider it an open, free speech discussion on problems in the world and not just in Honduras.

These days do make me miss a bit my days with the kids at CHDCC and RTI. The quality of communication between parents and teachers and kids was just so high that I should have known it would be hard for me to focus my energy in almost any other place for education. Thank you for that wonderful experience so that I could see what day care and education should be like.