What is a Community School?

Across Zambia the government has set up basic (primary) and high (secondary) schools. However these by no means solve Zambia’s educational problems. The most obvious difficulty is that there are insufficient state schools, so many children simply do not have a school near their village. Also, often the standard in the state schools is extremely poor. In addition, the state schools are dominated by a humanistic outlook; this implicitly teaches the children that God does not matter to everyday life.

For these reasons many villages have set up community schools. People in the village, led by the village headman, decide to form a committee. They then choose people to be teachers, find or build a hut; and so they have a school. A typical school will consist of the following:

• A couple of teachers with no training and fairly poor education
• A one-room hut
• A blackboard made of mud daubed on the wall
• Some chalk
• Some books borrowed from another school
• Around one hundred pupils

These schools usually cover grades one to four. What ages these children are will vary, as they do not all start at the same age. They tend to start at 7:00 in the morning and “knock-off” (a phrase Zambians use with an official air) in the mid-afternoon. A few of the schools then give adult education classes in the evening.

To experience walking into a community school is truly amazing. The children will be wildly excited to see a white man (“muzungu”), but will be rigidly disciplined and drilled by the teachers. They are most likely to stand to attention and shout “Good morning sir, how are you?” in perfect unison. This will happen even if you are a woman and it is the afternoon.

This typifies an aspect of Zambian education: they are good at rote-learning, but poor at understanding how to use what they have learned. Please pray that we may be able to redress this weakness.