Lobster in a Bucket

Education...Uganda Style

I have heard under-achievers in America whistfully pine for the British system of secondary school education. How you do in your classes doesn't really matter, so long as you don't fail out. All that really matters is that you marshall up the energy to do well on one single test. If you can do well on the test, then you can go to a good school. After seeing how the British system works, I'm pretty sure that it's only a good idea for the over-priveleged and under-stimulated. People like me.

In Uganda, it works out in really backwards ways. Ugandan students, that are faced with not the advantages in life someone like myself had, are forced to recon with this one test, to determine whether or not they can get the degree that will get them a good job, and let them escape poverty. So all their education leading up to their O-levels and A-levels becomes about telling them what they need to know to pass the test. It becomes really hard to educate, when you have to be afraid of not knowing the right, arbitrarily chosen information that is on the test.

It's kind of like a hyper-exaggerated credential based system. Here, everything is based on the credential that you get because of the score that you recieved. This further harms the process of education over time. In other words, the concerns that some voice in America that our country is caring too much about certification, and not enough about education, is really over-stated when compared to a country working under a British system.

The British system, in Britain itself, is working out problematically in another way. There, rather than being too hard for students, university entrance tests are becoming too easy. Too many people are doing well, because British authorities don't want to shut people out of university education. But this other extreme is really just as harmful for students. In both cases their educations suffer. In places like Uganda, because the all-important test is too hard, in Britain because it is too easy.

In either case, it seems that reducing everything to one universal test, while egalitarian, is too simplistic, and too restrictive.