Why it is going on silently in Uganda

By Carol Natukunda

IT had been a prison. Some children ignored her while others mocked her for scoring low marks. The teacher picked favourites, but she endured lashes everyday.

“I don’t like school,” says 11-year-old Christine Musoke. “They give us a lot of homework. If you don’t complete it, you are beaten.”

It was stressful for the little girl and her sister Kate, only aged nine. In desperation, their mother took a bold step: Last year, she withdrew them from the school they attended, and began teaching them at home.

Now, as the school shuttle drives past their home on Gaba Road each morning, the girls report to a tiny room in their house, with two desks adjacent to each other and a cabin containing neatly stacked books and pencils.

With their mother, Susan Musoke, close by, they study English, SST, Maths and Science. On some days, the girls go to the compound to play hide-and-seek, pick plants, leaves and tiny insects.

Their mother watches them from a distance and asks them to name the main parts of the objects. “In our house, this is education,” says Musoke, a teacher. “They are learning everything they need to know without hating education. They are not harassed for not passing their homework.”

Home schooling is silently going on in Uganda. Unimpressed by the tense schedules in traditional schools, a small, but constantly growing number of affluent families are choosing to teach their children. But they fear to have their pictures taken.

Those families fear they will be publicly identified from the pictures, yet the phenomenon still sounds strange to the ordinary Ugandan.

“I might be swamped with calls of people who want to come and see how I am doing it. I love my privacy.”

Such parents are also under attack from senior educationists who fear that home-schooled children can become social misfits.

“Children need to be with other children,” says senior educator, Prof. Senteza Kajubi. “It is good to know that parents are taking interest in their children’s education, but the social skill of dealing with someone you were not born with is lost. They don’t learn how to respect differences.”

Most important, critics argue that parents who lack teacher training and experience cannot provide a solid and well-rounded education.

“How do you teach something you were not trained to teach?” asks Sempala Kigozi, the chairperson of the education and training committee of Wakiso Headteachers Association. “How does an English teacher, for instance, suddenly become a teacher for Maths? That is why we have specialties.”

Kigozi argues that it is difficult to know, if a home-schooled child is receiving ‘equivalent instruction.’ “At school, business is business. But can it really be the same at home?” he wonders. But for home-scholars like Musoke, the rewards outweigh the problems.

They argue that the power to learn what children want and when they want it, is so exciting that they will never grow apathetic. And if they can protect their children from peer pressure and social ills, they say, they will be better equipped to face such issues as adults.

“They are going to be able to handle themselves out there. Of course the other subjects are in there, too. I can teach Maths while doing shopping with Christine or teach her measurements while we cook in the kitchen,” Musoke confides.

While every family has different reasons for abandoning traditional schools, they all share a common desire to choose what their children study and to monitor the learning process. The decision, they say, reaches beyond academics to define someone.

A few years ago, Julia Majugo, formerly a teacher at Rainbow Academy, quit her job so she could home-school her three children.

“I wanted to make an impact so that one day, when I am in my grave, they will be grateful to me for what they are. Education is not only about Mathematics or SST, neither is it about the quality of schools. It is about helping children to understand concepts and to instill in them moral values.

“Every parent knows her own values. We all know what we want for our children and I knew I could not achieve that if I continued to stay away from my children for long hours. Nobody is going to make your children what you want them to be,” she says.

Musoke agrees: “I want my children to think hard and examine things. I want them to like themselves and learn early in life what makes them happy. And their school was not doing it. “By the time they are finished here, they will be intelligent and have a sense of who they are.”

Musoke uses the Ugandan curriculum to teach her children, and occasionally gets tutors to test her children.

But Majugo uses the international curriculum. It varies from junior, high school and tertiary institution level.

Majugo’s children Gabriel, Mitchell and Angel, are now used to the fact that their mother is their class teacher. Better still, that their home in Kansanga is their school.

“I do not miss the normal school at all, because if something is hard for me, I approach mummy very easily,” says Gabriel, 11, now in Grade VI. The curriculum is not about rushing the children to school, says Majugo.

“You take your time. When they are done with a certain grade, we change books. Occasionally, we follow the Ugandan curriculum and give them say, a three-month holiday. It is inspiring and fulfilling to see your children discover and learn new things daily, compared to a boarding school where you have to wait for the end of term report.”

She will stop home schooling them when they complete grade 12, which is an equivalent of A’ levels.

The big question is how such children would take their Primary Leaving Examinations, O’ and A’ levels or the GSCE, for those on the international curriculum.

Education and Careers established that most of them arrange with the top traditional schools or international academies to have their children registered for the exams.

So in the end, you teach your child, and let him or her compete with others in the national exams.