Though the rare private religious-based school does exist, the large majority of Mozambican students pursue their studies at a government-run public school. First through seventh grades are completely free, while 8-12th grades cost around 250 Meticais (around $8) per year, an amount not easy to find all at once for many.
The school system was roughly based off of the South African system. Grades 1-5 are considered first level primary school. I am not that familiar with the general curriculum for these grades, but like in The States each class has one teacher with them all day and who teaches all courses. During these grades some courses are still taught in the local dialect while the students learn Portuguese in the classroom. With that said, many students learn Portuguese first at school and then more at home. Local dialects (all Bantu based languages, of which there are a few dozen in Mozambique) are the primary tongues for all interactions, conversations, and work outside of the largest of provincial capitals. Sixth and seventh grades are the second level of primary school. Local language is all but absent from these lessons and instruction of English as a foreign language begins. Students have the same teacher all day except for English. This introduction of English in 6th grade has begun only in the last couple years and is part of a national effort to make English a commonly spoke alternative language. All countries bordering Mozambique are English-speaking and as are most tourists that pass through here.
Primary schools of the first level are by far the most common schools in the country. Traveling down every passable road in the rural areas you’ll find a 1st-4th grade school about every 10-15 miles. Sometimes these (and this goes for secondary schools as well) consist of little more than a grass roof on four posts and a dirt floor with no desks, while in other areas they are blocks multi-level bare plastered brick classrooms with double desks and windows. Clearly there are many more people that do not live on these roads and need to walk miles to school everyday. 6th-7th grade schools are always attached to a 1st-5th grade school to form “complete primary schools”. These are a little harder to find in the very rural areas. In some areas students will stay at a house near school, of a friend or relative, during the school week and only return home on the weekend. Sometimes this need for room and board leads to students also being ‘maids’ in a house near the school they attend (see the Cooking section).
Each district of every province has at least one first cycle secondary school (8th-10th grade) and more and more now also have a second cycle secondary school which includes 11th and 12th grades. In 8th-10th grades each student studies the same 10 subjects (different topics each year, obviously) for 3 years: Portuguese, Mathematics, English, History, Geography, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Drafting, and Physical Education. At the end of 10th grade everyone takes 9 national exams (no exam for PE) in one week. These exams cover any material from 8th-10th grades and count for a very significant portion of your final grade which determines if you graduate.
Now, in many countries this task would be daunting but possible. Textbooks, resources, worksheets, and the internet would make it possible to be prepared for such a week of exams, though personally I still would not want to do it. The situation here is a little different. To pass a test or grade you only need to achieve a 50%, but it is rare to find a student who achieves above a 90% on everything (Actually, I have encountered teachers who believe that students should not earn 100% because that means they know as much as the teacher. Also, students who consistently earn above a 90% are doubted as is it assumed to be impossible.), and there is a reason for this. You can expect that the teacher in the room is the only one with a textbook. The walls are not covered with posters, diagrams, or student work and most schools do not have a library or the means to make worksheets that can help. And as for the internet….no; only accessible with some cell phones and still its not reliable. Each student has his/her notebooks for each subject for each year of secondary school. These are treasured. What this also means is that the teacher’s role is changed. The teacher’s principle job, in the 3 lessons per class they have weekly, is to pass on information, not explain it. There just isn’t much time to practice, apply, and integrate topics. Just imagine what this does for critical thinking skills. Just imagine how easy this makes passing those national exams. Just imagine what kind of cheating this induces.
Cheating here does not have the same sense of moral evil as it carries in the States. In fact, it is super common and some teachers just look the other way. Its complicated and has cultural ties. I’ll get more into this another time, but community ties here are iron strong. Common thinking dictates that you give what you have to the person that doesn’t have, regardless of your circumstance. This applies for knowledge, even in a classroom and even during an exam. And, by the way, knowledge can also include information directly from the notebook you have hidden in your pants, not just what you memorized. So cheating during the tests is rampant. When I taught secondary school biology here I used to administer tests and see if I could break my personal record for the number of cheat sheets I confiscated. At one point a wall in my house was decorated with them. It wasn’t that hard because since cheating was wildly accepted, students never had the need to develop clever or clandestine techniques. In fact I believe my vigilance provoked the evolution of more creative cheating in my own classrooms. Not to toot my own horn though. For the most part a cheater would sit in their desk doing nothing but staring directly at you, the teacher, with huge eyes as if the wall behind you beheld the end of the world and they couldn’t help but watch. This was sign numero uno. All I would have to do is take my eyes of this student for a moment and then look back as he or she pulled out their cheat sheet. Seriously, that’s all; like fish in a barrel. They all knew it was ‘wrong’ but laughed when they got caught as if I just I performed a magic trick.
In secondary schools, the grade levels are organized into what is called ‘turmas’, which could be equated to homerooms in the American school system. Depending on the secondary school these homerooms can range from 40 to 120 students in one classroom. In Mozambique students stay in their homeroom all day and it is the teachers that switch classrooms after each period. Since teachers do not have supplies, aside from maybe a textbook, there are no complaints about the moving rooms every hour and since the students do not switch classrooms between periods it cuts down on needed transition time. However, the result is a class of students who have every class together everyday of every week of the entire year. Any teacher in America would agree that this will often create discipline problems because the students get to know each too well. Classroom management techniques here are carried with more of an iron fist, which I imagine keeps the kids in line out of fear. With classes of up to 120 students the difficulties are easy to imagine. Also, I have yet to see a classroom with this many desks. Sometimes the room has desks for 40 and sometimes no desks at all. Since each room houses the same students each day it is their responsibility to care for the desks they have, though desk ‘stealing’ does happen between turmas. Notice that up to this point I have not really commented on the style or quality of teaching within these walls. These physical conditions alone are sufficient for making an academic environment very challenging.
Each time a teacher walks into a classroom all students, whether seated on the floor or in a desk, stand to greet the teacher: “Bom Dia, Senhor(a) Professor(a).” The teacher responds and customarily asks how they are, and the class responds in unison: “Estamos bem, e Senhor(a) Professor(a), como está?” (‘We are fine, and Teacher, how are you?’) At this point the students remain standing waiting for the teacher to give them permission to sit. A current Peace Corps Volunteer recently told me that 15 minutes into one of her first lessons here she realized the students were all on their feet taking notes. She had forgotten to tell them to sit and they had respectfully waited for her instructions to do so.
What follows is the daily roll call made quicker through the use of number assigned to each student. The numbers are called and those that do not respond ‘present’ are noted as absent. Then the lesson proceeds. I already mentioned that the teacher is often the only one to have the textbook. From my experience this is true, but I imagine the situation is a little better in cities. Rote memorization is a common study skill here and one reinforced by teachers. However, it is a one-question, one-answer system. I baffled many students by informing them that there were multiple correct answers to come questions and they should not be afraid to be wrong. Though this is slowly changing for the better, the majority of the high school teachers have little more than a high school education themselves. Secondary school teachers are now required to have what could loosely be compared to an Associates Degree or Teaching Credential, but this is quite new. Becoming more common, and mandatory, are teacher training schools for all new teachers. They are one or two-year programs covering teaching methodology and more in-depth subject-matter instruction. However, they are not considered to be university-level. Additionally you can get what is more or less a teaching credential in 2-years at a fully accredited university, or take 4-years to do a bachelors degree. The biggest limiting factors in attending to university are physical access (On average there is 1 university per province, which means about one school per 3 million citizens.), and price of tuition (There is 1 public university in the country that has opened some satellite branches, but is centralized in the national capital in the south. Some years back I recall there being only 17 openings in the whole Biology department for incoming students. All interested students in the whole country took a test to try to get one of those 17 spots.). Some correspondence degrees have become available in the past couple years, which improves access to higher education though doesn’t obviously provide a rich academic environment. Those that have obtained a higher educational degree of any sort see the difference in their paycheck. The salary bump for a teacher with a high school education to one with a Bachelors Degree is about 300%. This sounds like an excellent incentive for going to university despite the challenges, but there are few scholarships and no loans, so all tuition must be paid at the beginning of each semester.
Even if you were lucky enough to live in a city with a university and have the financial means to attend, studying and teaching would be a very difficult balance. I have one close friend who is doing it. Teaching secondary school from 7am to 12pm Monday through Friday and then working on his Bachelor’s in Philosophy from 12:30pm to 5:30pm each afternoon Monday through Friday. He works in order to afford his studies and studies in order to one day provide more for his family. To pull this off he needs to live in the provincial capital while his wife (who also works and has yet to receive her requested transfer) and kids live 3hrs away. He rarely gets to see them.
The school day here is broken into 3 separate sessions and each session has a totally different group of students. The morning goes from 7am to 12pm, the afternoon session from 12:30pm to 5:30pm and the evening session from 6pm to 11pm. This maximizes the use of the school building, but also means some schools have thousands of students. The secondary school in my town has over 6,000. The morning and afternoon sessions consist of ‘regular-aged’ students, and by that I mean the students you would expect to see in 3rd grade or 10th grade (or a bit older). However, night school exists for adults, older teens, and pregnant girls so that they all have the opportunity to study despite responsibilities at home. Night school provides education to many that did not master it or that simply lived to far away from a secondary school and so missed out on the opportunity earlier in life, but unfortunately it often provides a very low quality education.
Due to this session schedule, some teachers are assigned classes in two sessions per day. On average a teacher works 24 classroom hours per week (for example 3 lessons to 8 turmas each week), but overtime is also an option. Regardless, night school is often short-changed on good teachers and accountability. Many of these teachers, much like the students, have day jobs so hours in the classroom at night does not bring with it much energy or creativity. It is honestly hard to find positive things to say about night school. Often it is an opportunity offered but not fulfilled.
All of these conditions make passing any grade, regardless of age, grade, or session, difficult. In my experience it is rare to find a student who has never failed at least one grade between 1st and 12th grades. And if you consecutively failed a single grade 3 times in secondary school you are automatically transferred to night school, which I imagine significantly lowers your chance of passing that grade due to the lower quality education and greater chance for distractions and drop-outs. Learning is tough here. However, education is valued deeply as a means out of poverty and people will pursue a high school diploma for many many years as it is the benchmark of being considered an educated person.
