Low Inventory

Sometimes during the surveying job that just wrapped up, I had a chance to visit village schools. They slowly began to seem similar to me. Now and then I even wondered if even the students weren’t the same people, silently running ahead of me from village to village on unseen trails.

Typically what I found were one-room buildings containing between 15 and 30 kids, spread among five grades. The good news was that often each grade had its own green-skirted teacher, making for a pretty good ratio. The bad news was that student ages didn’t always match their grades, suggesting that kids start and stop often, in keeping with their families’ financial needs or migration patterns. All of the schools had space for lots more students than actually showed up. Rakhine State is known to have the lowest rate of primary school participation in the country.

On one of the visits I stayed long enough to take inventory. The school, which was among the better resourced I saw, contained the following:

12 very long, low student desks
5 plastic chairs (students sit on the floor)
6 blackboards
3 teacher desks and 3 bamboo pointers
2 flags
1 map of Myanmar
1 number poster
1 English alphabet poster that at first I could not figure out – maybe you can see the logic:
               AEFHIKLM
               NTVWXYZ
               OCQS
               BDGJPRU
1 five-gallon water bottle
1 broom and dustpan
1 Buddha image
1 vase under the Buddha containing dried-out flowers
no children’s art
no calendar
no books

The vision statement of Myanmar’s Ministry of Education aspires to “generate a learning society capable of facing the challenges of the Knowledge Age.” Yet education expenditures here, as a percentage of GDP, are among the lowest in the world. Perhaps it’s no surprise that families vote with their feet and don’t send their kids regularly. The primary school completion rate nationwide is just over 50%.