Education in Zambia

Education in Zambia

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There are 8,000 primary schools and only 500 secondary schools in Zambia.
The majority of primary schools are located in under-resourced rural areas.
There are 2.8 million pupils in primary school and 340,000 in grades 8-9 with 220,000 in grades 10-12. Schooling concludes at grade 12.
There only 71,000 teachers, for a total of 3.4 million students which is a ratio of 100:1 pupils to teachers. Schools lose more than 12% of their teachers each year due to death, sickness, professional isolation and a lack of social amenities. It is very hard to attract and retain teachers in rural areas – particularly female teachers.
Textbooks, pens, pencils, paper, paint and a plethora of other basic teaching materials are in very short supply and in many schools there are none at all.
Less than 17% of students get to complete secondary school. After basic school there are simply not enough schools to allow most students to progress, but students also leave before then for a number of reasons, including lack of financial resources, loss of parents or family commitments. Girls may drop out of school because of early marriage, which is common in Zambia particularly in rural areas, or pregnancy, or just pressure to undertake family duties.

Children are brought up from childhood in an unquestioning home environment. Children in most families are too busy looking after their immediately younger siblings. No one is encouraged to ask why, what, where and when questions, just as the parents were not encouraged to do. So pupils arrive at school without questioning skills, leave school without questioning skills and enter the workplace without problem-solving skills. Whole generations are unable to question, to analyse to investigate the alternatives: they do as they are asked, nothing more. They are not able to look or think outside of the box.

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Two thirds of primary schools have no electricity. The few computers that exist are in secondary schools and are mostly obsolete computers from Europe that are a minimum of 10 years old. These are no use in Europe and generally unable to run the programs or the internet of today. Such computers often fail, costing more than a new computer to fix. Some even arrive at the schools broken after their journies.

With classes of often over 100 students, and teachers teaching double shifts with no resources, interactive innovative teaching is a challenge, therefore most teachers revert to emulating how they were taught, by writing notes on the boards and getting the students to copy them down (rote learning). This occurs in grade 12 as much as it does in Grade 1. Little explanation is given, and children are not encouraged to ask questions on what they are being taught; therefore children have little understanding of what they have learned and are unable to apply the knowledge that they have been taught.

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Education in Zambia

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