My education began down the street. My parents’ best friends lived around the corner where the wife ran a daycare, and I spent my toddler years learning about space, taking cooking classes, and performing every few weeks in a recital for the parents. It was the best way to start my educational career and an easy choice for my parents to make – they knew and trusted the early childhood teacher training their friend had gotten in the UK before she moved to Tanzania, and they shared the same values around a creative, play-based, and academically rigorous education. The more difficult question would be what would come next.
Education in Tanzania before independence can be chronologically understood in three parts — indigenous education integrated within daily life, religious education introduced by Asian and European traders and explorers, and colonial education designed to educate a future workforce. After independence, Nyerere published “The Arusha Declaration” in 1967 with “free and compulsory education” listed as a central priority for the new socialist state, and the next two decades saw the expansion of public education, with several successful schools producing academically gifted and patriotically-minded students. However, a slowly growing class of teaching professionals could not meet the tsunami-level demands for a quality education, and when Nyerere stepped down in 1985, his successor, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, ushered in an era of political and economic liberalization. A free market educational system was effectively enacted in which all schools – public and privately run – required tuition payments, that often correlated with standard.
One of my parents had been educated almost exclusively during the Nyerere era, and the other almost exclusively in the UK, and so when they were looking for an elementary school for me in the late 1990s, they were navigating a system and socio-political context that was both new to them, and new in general. They joined along with their friends, peers, and other young professionals in Tanzania to explore the landscape of private, predominantly White, international schools in Dar-es-Salaam, looking through every one of them to find a place for their first-born, four-year-old daughter.
Parents spend an excruciating amount of time thinking about where to send their children to school. I say this not as a parent, but as someone who has spent years listening to the parents of four-year-olds (and younger) weighing their school options based on the number of kids in the classroom, if the teachers look nice, what books are on the shelf, what experiments the kids are doing, where the graduates go to college, and about a million other things. Over twenty-years after the fact, when I ask my dad why they chose the elementary school that they did, the explanation ended up taking three hours.
This is because, for better or worse, where we go to school matters. School is where kids spend almost a third of their day everyday, but almost independent of what is taking place inside of them, schools become a way to act out our ideals, or at least engage in some virtue signalling around them. Do we want a school that is diverse in its student body, or proud in its homogeneity? Do we want a school known for producing students who are free-spirited and adventurous, or disciplined and focused? Do we want a school that has its quality come from its ticket price, or from its role in the community?
What makes this question of school choice even more infuriating is that the people most affected by this choice often have the smallest say. Parents are called to make a decision for a tiny human and they will miss 99% of what follows that choice, barred from the classrooms, playgrounds, and cafeterias where all the action goes down. Not only that, but they have to consider how this choice will impact that tiny human years from now in a future near impossible to predict. And so often families will go with their heart, lining up all that is most important to them and trying to find the four walls that best embody their principles, before letting it go and moving on to the next critical parental decision.
Reflecting later on the aforementioned three-hour response, I was able to glean some key insights into the minds of the the thirty and twenty-nine-year-old parents of two looking for an elementary school for their eldest daughter in Dar-es-Salaam in 1999. Quality was the eternal white whale and the dogged pursuit of a good school that earned that label not because of how much you were paying for it, but because you could see it in the kids. With a good school, kids knew and could talk about what they learned about at school, and parents knew and could talk about what their kids learned about at school. It was not just some place where you left your kids for a couple of hours, a good school was somewhere that your kids left changed after a couple of hours, and changed for the better.
Wrapped up in my parents’ understanding of what made a good school were the skills and knowledge that they wanted to be imparted onto me. They wanted me to be able to think for myself, and to talk through and share and debate my ideas with others. They wanted me to be exposed to ideas primarily through literature and history, and so what schools offered in terms of their humanities was critical too. What books were going to be taught? Which histories explored? How and what were the kids going to write?
Lastly, the wider school community was a major factor for my parents. They spent their own lives transporting confidently between home in Tanzania to the world of England where they had gone to school and had worked. The wanted an education that would prepare and allow me to move around with the same ease, especially in a world that on the cusp of 21st century, appeared to only be becoming more international. And, at the same time, both of my parents were raised within their own respective political legacies, and they wanted me to feel confident and be knowledgeable in who I would grow up to be as a Black, Tanzanian woman. Finding a school that could meet these cultural demands, in addition to teaching strong humanities whilst being a good school overall, this was what some of the search for looked like for them.
Of course in many ways, school choice is, in and of itself, a privilege. It is those with money and/or access surveying the options available to them and then using their money and/or access to secure their choice. If one considers educational systems to be made up of a finite number of resources — as I do — then it might follow that structures that allow for too much choice lead to the hoarding of these finite resources in pockets of privilege. There are only so many professionally trained teachers and in the marketplace of options, they will all flock to environments where they are paid their worth and only made available to the students and families who can afford them.
Then there are others who school choice is not the be-all and end-all that it may be for others. Children should just go to the school that is closest, and all that happens will happen, and the parents and community will be nearby to make sure that what needs to be done is being done. Maybe all these debates around school choice are over-exaggerations or just bullhorns being provided to privileged parents looking to make sure their privilege lives on.
Paradoxically, however, one might argue that these counter perspectives on school choice only further confirm the significance of school choice. It is through these choices, whether made or unmade, that families extrapolate the mélange of the values that they want to express both through and to their children. They might choose a school because it teaches Tom Sawyer and literature is what is important in their life. They might choose a school because it is the public, neighbourhood school down the street and supporting public education is what is important in their life. They might not choose a school at all and just show up at the closest one because convenience and flexibility is what is important in their life. And like all choices made in life, they are made better not by judgement but by curiosity, and the time spent in conversation with others, like a daughter following up with her father, decades later.
The other night, I was at a dinner party in which a few of the guests had gone to the same high school and were tepidly attempting to ID others by asking, “Where did you go to school?” Once all the one-time classmates found each other, they launched into conversations breaking down their separate but similar experiences, frequently using the name of the school as an adjective or catchall label, all speaking the same language when it comes to the school that they all left long ago.
I’ll see that with myself too when I speak to old classmates, and I’ll see it at work when one of the grandparents in my class goes over to hug the preschool teacher because they both went to the school that we are all at today. Where we go to school stays with us, even if the building changes or disappears or we do, and so it matters. And it matters not only for the right reasons, but for the wrong ones too. The ways in which schools can harm and their reputations harm too. But of course, we know little of this going in. Parents find a school, hope that it’s right, and years later, “Where did you go to school?” begins a story that never stops being written.
And here I begin mine. In September 2000, the same month that I turned five, I started at Haven of Peace Academy. It was a newly opened missionary school, run predominantly by Americans and Europeans with a curriculum that looked towards the West. My kindergarten class was about 50% Tanzanian and 50% expatriates, and we were all paying tuition that was the third or fourth-highest in the city. HOPAC, as we all called it, would be where I would deepen my love of reading, find my love for soccer, and become increasingly insecure and self-conscious as my class would become less diverse over the years. That was all years to come though. This was just the start of an education.
What I would give to hear that 3-hour conversation! Maybe you need to include some audio in this fantastic writing exploration?!