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The Beautiful Tree

Page 1

by James Tooley




  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  1. A Discovery in India . . .

  What Everyone Knows

  In the Slums of Hyderabad, a Discovery . . .

  2. . . . That Was No Discovery After All

  The 500-Pound Gorilla

  No Soft Option

  3. A Puff of Logic, Nigeria

  The Nigerian Ex-Chief Inspector

  Makoko

  Coda

  Only an Urban Phenomenon?

  4. The Shifting Goalposts, Ghana

  The Honourable Minister

  A Day in the Life

  Another School

  The Remains of the Day

  A Million Miles Away

  5. The Logically Impossible, China

  The Red Flag

  Gansu

  Nemesis

  The Reality: Private Schools for the Poor in Rural China

  The Extra Mile

  6. A Kenyan Conundrum—and Its Solution

  The Man to Meet

  The Conundrum

  Kibera

  Kakamega

  Private Schools Serving the Poor in Kibera

  Free Primary Education Did Not Lead to an Increase in Enrollment

  If You Go to a Market . . .

  Education Free, for All; or Education Free-for-All?

  The Conundrum Solved

  7. Poor Ignoramuses

  The Bad and the Very Ugly

  Public Education for the Poor Is a Disaster . . .

  . . . But the Only Solution Is More and Better Public Education

  Save the Children from the Development Experts

  8. An Inspector Calls

  Flashing Policemen

  Last-Chance Schools Need Regulating

  Regulations, Regulations, Regulations

  Instant Gratification

  Parents the Losers?

  Baden Powell and the Really Important People

  Problems, Problems, Problems

  Benign Big Brother

  9. Old Monk, and Young Nuns on Motorbikes

  Not Ignoramuses After All

  Small Is Beautiful

  More Committed Teachers

  Providing What Parents Want

  Whose “Hidden Curriculum”?

  Children in Private Schools Outperform Those in Public School

  More Effectiveand More Efficient

  The Special Case of China

  Good Choices

  10. Making Enemies with Joy Beside Me

  Return to Zimbabwe

  Five Good Reasons?

  11. The Men Who Uprooted the Beautiful Tree

  Dalrymple’s Footsteps

  Munro’s Minute

  From Madras to Bengal, Bombay, and the Punjab

  Private Schools for the Poor in 19th-Century India

  Enter Sir Philip Hartog

  Odd Bedfellows

  Low-Paid Teachers?

  Low-Quality Buildings?

  Low-Quality Teaching Methods?

  The Madras Method

  The Strengths of the Indigenous System

  Enter Macaulay

  The Galloping Horses

  An Unexpected Ally

  The Modern Macaulays

  Not Just in India

  Forgotten Lessons

  12. Educating Amaretch

  Easterly’s Dilemma

  Bringing the Beautiful One to School

  Quality Matters

  The Brand-Conscious Poor

  A Solvable Problem

  And Finally: Implications for the West?

  The Eclipse

  Postscript

  References

  Notes

  About the Author

  Cato Institute

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Copyright © 2009 by Cato Institute.

  All rights reserved.

  The Cato Institute gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution of Steve G. Stevanovich to the production of this book.

  “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1923, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright 1951 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tooley, James.

  The beautiful tree : a personal journey into how the world’s poorest people are educating themselves / James Tooley.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-933995-92-2 (alk. paper)

  eISBN : 97-8-193-39959-3

  1. Poor—Education—Developing countries. 2. People with social disabilities—Education—Developing countries. 3. Tooley, James—Travel—Developing countries. I. Title.

  LC4065.T66 2008

  371.909172’4--dc22 2009004899

  Cover design by Jon Meyers.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  CATO INSTITUTE

  1000 Massachusetts Ave., N.W.

  Washington, D.C. 20001

  www.cato.org

  To Pauline

  Acknowledgments

  First, I want to thank all the educational entrepreneurs I have met over the years who are actively serving poor communities. Some of those I am working with now, who deserve my deepest appreciation and admiration, are M. Anwar, Reshma Lohia, Yasmin Haroon Lohi, K. Surya Reddy, K. Narsimha Reddy, M. Wajid, Ghouse M. Khan, S. A. Basith, M. Faheemuddin, Alice Pangwai, George Mikwa, Fanuel Okwaro, Theophilus Quaye, Ken Donkoh, B. S. E. Ayesminikan, and Liu Qiang. For assisting in funding and associated advice and support over the years, I want to thank (in roughly chronological order) Neil McIntosh; Michael Latham; Tim Emmett; the late Sir John Templeton; Jack Templeton; Charles Harper; Arthur Schwartz; Chester Finn; Peter Woicke; Stuart, Hilary and Andrew Williams; Theodore Agnew; and Richard Chandler. Colleagues and friends who have supported and encouraged me in my endeavors include Khan Latif Khan, Jack Maas, Gurcharan Das, Nandan Nilekani, the late Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu, I. V. Subba Rao, Hernando de Soto, Christopher Crane, Parth Shah, James Shikwati, Thompson Ayodele, Lanre Olaniyan, Barun Mitra, S. V. Gomathi, P. Paul Saran, Sailaja Edla, Chris and Suzie Jolly, Naveen Mandava, Bob Leighton, Deepak Jayaraman, Leonard Liggio, Jo Kwong, Terence Kealey, Linda Whet-stone, and John and Chris Blundell. For helping me to build the first embryonic chain of low-cost private schools in India, I thank Paul Gabie and the Orient Global team. Simon Kearney gave me useful comments on the manuscript, as did five anonymous referees, to whom I’m deeply grateful. Andrew Coulson has been the kind of editor and supporter an author dreams of, through good times and bad. Finally, I give thanks to my friends, colleagues, and students at Newcastle who’ve been an indispensable part of my life and work: Elaine Fisher, Karen Hadley, Nuntarat Charoenkul, Ekta Sodha, Liu Qiang (again), James Stanfield, Sugata Mitra, Richard Graham, and Pauline Dixon—to whom this book is dedicated.

  1. A Discovery in India . . .

  What Everyone Knows

  My first real job was as a mathematics teacher in Africa. Right out of college, a couple of years after Zimbabwe’s independence from Britain in 1980, I went to help “Comrade” Robert Mugabe build his new socialist society. And what better way to assist than through public education?

  During my interview with the minister of education at the Zimbabwe High Commission in London, I asked to be assigned to a rural school so that I could really help the poor. He smiled, clearly understanding my motivation, I thought. To my chagrin, I found myself posted to Queen Elizabeth High School, an all-girls school right in the center of Harare, the capital. Queen Elizabeth had originally been a whites-only elite institution
, although when I joined it had a mixture of races (“African,” “Asian,” and “European,” as they were classified).

  “This government wouldn’t waste you in the rural areas!” the (white) headmistress laughed when I arrived, meaning to compliment me on my mathematics degree. She explained that many daughters of politicians from the ruling party, Zanu-PF, were enrolled in her school, and of course they would look after themselves first! I dismissed her cynicism, putting it down to racism, and the incongruence of my assignment to administrative error. I also found my niche in the school; it seemed all the children trusted me, so I was able to help them get along with one another. But I spent as much of my spare time as possible in the rural “communal lands,” experiencing the realities of life there firsthand. In the process, I developed links between an impoverished rural public school and my own, bringing my privileged urban pupils there to help them appreciate all that Mugabe was doing for the povo—the ordinary people.

  Two years later, I managed to engineer an assignment to a public school in the Eastern Highlands. I lived and worked in a small school set on a plateau beneath the breathtakingly beautiful Manyau Mountains, from where the calls of baboons echoed as dusk fell and women returned from the river carrying buckets of water on their heads; leopards apparently still hunted at night on the rugged mountain slopes. I defended Mugabe’s regime to its critics, for at least it was engaged in bringing education to the masses, benefiting them in ways denied before independence. Before long, once richer urban people properly paid all their taxes and the international community coughed up a decent amount of aid, it would be able to make education free for all. That would be truly cause for celebration.

  After all, everyone knows that the world’s poor desperately need help if every child is to be educated. Help must come from their governments, which must spend billions of dollars more on building and equipping public schools, and training and supporting public school teachers, so that all children can receive a free primary school education. But governments in developing countries cannot succeed on their own. Everyone knows that they, too, need help. Only when rich Western governments spend much more on aid can every child be saved from ignorance and illiteracy. That’s the message we hear every day, from the international aid agencies and our governments, and from pop stars and other celebrities.

  As a young man, I believed this accepted wisdom. But over the past few years, I’ve been on a journey that has made me doubt everything about it. It’s a journey that started in the slums of Hyderabad, India, and has taken me to battle-scarred townships in Somaliland; to shantytowns built on stilts above the Lagos lagoons in Nigeria; to India again, to slums and villages across the country; to fishing villages the length of the Ghanaian shoreline; to the tin-and-cardboard huts of Africa’s largest slums in Kenya; to remote rural villages in the poorest provinces of northwestern China; and back to Zimbabwe, to its soon-to-be-bulldozed shantytowns. It’s a journey that has opened my eyes.

  Read the development literature, hear the speeches of our politicians, listen to our pop stars and actors, and above all the poor come across as helpless. Helplessly, patiently, they must wait until governments and international agencies acting on their behalf provide them with a decent education. So we need to give more! It’s urgent! Action, not words! It’s all I believed during my early years in Zimbabwe. But my journey has made me suspect that it was, however well intentioned, missing something crucial. Missing from the accepted wisdom is any sense of what the poor can do—are already doing—for themselves. It’s a journey that changed my life.

  Something quite remarkable is happening in developing countries today that turns the accepted wisdom on its head. I first discovered this for myself in January 2000.

  In the Slums of Hyderabad, a Discovery . . .

  After a stint teaching philosophy of education at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, I returned to England to complete my doctorate and later became a professor of education. Thanks to my experiences in sub-Saharan Africa and my modest but respectable academic reputation, I was offered a commission by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation to study private schools in a dozen developing countries.

  The lure of faraway places was too enticing to resist, but I was troubled by the project itself. Although I was to study private schools in developing countries, those schools were serving the middle classes and the elite. Despite my lifelong desire to help the poor, I’d somehow wound up researching bastions of privilege.

  The first leg of the trip began in New York in January 2000. As if to reinforce my misgivings that the project would do little for the poor, I was flown first class to London in the inordinate luxury of the Concorde. Forty minutes into the flight, as we cruised at twice the speed of sound and two miles above conventional air traffic, caviar and champagne were served. The boxer Mike Tyson (sitting at the front with a towel over his head for much of the journey) and singer George Michael were on the same flight. I felt lost.

  From London it was on to Delhi, Chennai, and Mumbai. By day, I evaluated five-star private schools and colleges that were very definitely for the privileged. By night, I was put up in unbelievably salubrious and attentive five-star hotels. But in the evenings, sitting and chatting with street children outside these very same hotels, I wondered what effect any of my work could have on the poor, whose desperate needs I saw all around me. I didn’t just want my work to be a defense of privilege. The middle-class Indians, I felt, were wealthy already. To me it all seemed a bit of a con: just because they were in a “poor” country, they were able to latch onto this international assistance even though they as individuals had no pressing need for it at all. I didn’t like it, but as I returned to my room and lay on the 500-thread-count Egyptian-cotton sheets, my discomfort with the program was forced to compete with a mounting sense of self-criticism.

  Then one day, everything changed. Arriving in Hyderabad to evaluate brand-new private colleges at the forefront of India’s hitech revolution, I learned that January 26th was Republic Day, a national holiday. Left with some free time, I decided to take an autorickshaw—the three-wheeled taxis ubiquitous in India—from my posh hotel in Banjara Hills to the Charminar, the triumphal arch built at the center of Muhammad Quli Shah’s city in 1591. My Rough Guide to India described it as Hyderabad’s “must see” attraction, and also warned that it was situated in the teeming heart of the Old City slums. That appealed to me. I wanted to see the slums for myself.

  As we traveled through the middle-class suburbs, I was struck by the ubiquity of private schools. Their signboards were on every street corner, some on fine specially constructed school buildings, but others grandly posted above shops and offices. Of course, it was nothing more than I’d been led to expect from my meetings in India already—senior government officials had impressed me with their candor when they told me it was common knowledge that even the middle classes were all sending their children to private schools. They all did themselves. But it was still surprising to see how many there were.

  We crossed the bridge over the stinking ditch that is the once-proud River Musi. Here were autorickshaws in abundance, cattle-drawn carts meandering slowly with huge loads of hay, rickshaws agonizingly peddled by painfully thin men. Cars were few, but motorbikes and scooters (“two-wheelers”) were everywhere—some carried whole families (the largest child standing in front; the father at the handlebars; his wife, sitting sidesaddle in her black burka or colorful sari, holding a baby, with another small child wedged in between). There were huge trucks brightly painted in lively colors. There were worn-out buses, cyclists, and everywhere pedestrians, whose cavalier attitude toward the traffic unnerved me as they stepped in front of us seemingly without a care in the world. From every vehicle came the noise of horns blaring—the drivers seemed to ignore their mirrors, if they had them at all. Instead, it seemed to be the responsibility of the vehicle behind to indicate its presence to the vehicle in front. This observation was borne out by the l
egend on the back of the trucks, buses, and autorickshaws, “Please Horn!” The noise of these horns was overwhelming: big, booming, deafening horns of the buses and trucks, harsh squealing horns from the autorickshaws. It’s the noise that will always represent India for me.

  All along the streets were little stores and workshops in makeshift buildings—from body shops to autorickshaw repair shops, women washing clothes next to paan (snack) shops, men building new structures next to the stalls of market vendors, tailors next to a drugstore, butchers and bakers, all in the same small hovel-like shops, dark and grimy, a nation of shopkeepers. Beyond them all rose the 400-year-old Charminar.

  My driver let me out, and told me he’d wait for an hour, but then called me back in a bewildered tone as I headed not to the Charminar but into the back streets behind. No, no, I assured him, this is where I was going, into the slums of the Old City. For the stunning thing about the drive was that private schools had not thinned out as we went from one of the poshest parts of town to the poorest. Everywhere among the little stores and workshops were little private schools! I could see handwritten signs pointing to them even here on the edge of the slums. I was amazed, but also confused: why had no one I’d worked with in India told me about them?

  I left my driver and turned down one of the narrow side streets, getting quizzical glances from passersby as I stopped underneath a sign for Al Hasnath School for Girls. Some young men were serving at the bean-and-vegetable store adjacent to a little alleyway leading to the school. I asked them if anyone was at the school today, and of course the answer was no for it was the national holiday. They pointed me to an alleyway immediately opposite, where a hand-painted sign precariously supported on the first floor of a three-story building advertised “Students Circle High School & Institute: Registered by the Gov’t of AP.” “Someone might be there today,” they helpfully suggested.

 

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