End of thinking capacity: Education’s lobotomizing potential.

Every Friday afternoon at my school, the last period is reserved for a Careers and Life Skills (CALS) lesson. Each homeroom teacher is expected to lead a discussion about important topics related to a student’s life inside and outside of school. As a homeroom teacher for Grade 12 students I have great diversity of topics from which to choose, and I enjoy speaking very candidly with the young adults in my charge. Last week we discussed AIDS, concurrency patterns, and sexual health (H/T Evan Davies). This week we talked about academic dishonesty and its implications.

I was spurred to talk about academic dishonesty for several reasons. First, I have had persistent problems with cheating and plagiarism since first teaching in Nyagatare last year. Second, my seventh grade students have (for years, it appears) been rewarded with marks for simply copying answers directly from texts instead of rewriting ideas in their own words. I have waged a vicious battle against this habit for two months now. Third, two seventh grade students were just suspended for cheating on a test. It was not the first time either student had been caught cheating. And fourth, during a recent G12 history lesson my brightest student enlightened me about etc.’s true meaning. I was at the board soliciting examples of cultural change during European colonization of Africa, and after several suggestions the student said “E-T-C.” I was confused so I asked, “What does E-T-C mean?” “End of thinking capacity” was his response. How clever.

So I spoke with my students about academic dishonesty and its practical and ethical consequences. Using “End of thinking capacity” as a starting point, I explained how an inability to think critically and independently encourages an unhealthy reliance on others. Next we agreed that “End of thinking capacity” becomes a crutch which predisposes students to cheating, plagiarism, and other forms of academic dishonesty, which then becomes a crutch itself. Finally, after much prodding, we also reached a consensus that academic dishonesty is a negative habit to develop because it may encourage other more nefarious moral transgressions later in life.

At that point I read an excerpt from a short newspaper editorial written by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. while he was a student at Morehouse. I have reproduced the section below.

The function of education…is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.

A strand of conventional wisdom about Rwanda’s 1994 Genocide is that a morally bankrupt educated elite corrupted and manipulated a large population of undereducated and brainwashed peasants. This explanation has some credence and for many just feels like a logical conclusion.* For many of the students, some of them old enough to be survivors, the implication of Dr. King’s argument was clear. The genocide understandably pervades everything.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to explore some other important questions. For example, I wanted us to consider the entire Rwandan values system. How the genocide might have altered morality in Rwanda particularly interested me. I would have begun at, “Morality is relative up to a certain point,” and continued on to Rwandan society’s view of copying or appropriating another’s work, whether material or intellectual. African societies are often stereotyped as communally oriented, so perhaps what one culture sees as cheating is seen as sharing here. A big difference, no?

Another interest was less philosophical. I see more and more a web of connections forming amongst dependency theory, rote memorization, and poor education standards. When a teacher does not demand the highest quality of work produced in an honest way, and rather accepts work copied from another source, independent thought is stunted and rote memorization is rewarded. In time, the student becomes dependent on what another has produced. He or she can only recycle others’ formulations and repeat others’ declarations. Eventually, the student may reach a point where original thought is entirely foreign.

This web’s implications in Rwanda are troubling. President Kagame’s remarkably ambitious plans for remaking the country as a middle-income state driven by a technological service industry may be hogwash without creative problem solvers. With some basic pedagogical changes, Rwanda can redirect to a brighter course and cultivate more of those students. However, the ship is big, unwieldy, and still recovering from 1994’s cataclysm.

I suspect many teachers in Rwanda know this. They understand at some level that rote memorization is disastrous for young people. Yet, change among faculty and administrators is not easy. There is a Rwandan proverb which says, “A young tree is easier to bend than an old one.” Therefore, students may have to lead the charge in breaking free from the crippling system now imposed upon them. They must raise their own consciousness about these important issues. They must own their own education and demand nothing but the best. If they don’t know, they should investigate. Of course, most everything about Rwandan education militates against a student’s proclivity to do so, but if railing about academic dishonesty gets us just one step closer to that realization then I will persist. What choice do we have?

*Sadly it may also encourage an unsatisfying brand of insincere exculpatory excuses for horrific crimes, and there are other very important angles of examination, but that was not my focus during the lesson.

Revisiting Nyamata.

It is April again, and the rains have returned. They are accompanied by reflection and sorrow across Rwanda, a time when communities come together to discuss genocide and demagoguery and publicly mourn the murdered. It has been seventeen torturous Aprils since the most horrific mass murder in human history, but I think the pain and anguish, so expertly veiled at other times, wells up in the weeks surrounding Genocide memorial week. At the last moment I decided to forgo the large ceremony at the national stadium two Thursdays ago, the beginning of Memorial Week, and instead sat at home quietly contemplating my role here. I had decided beforehand to share thoughts I had already put to paper, so I spent my day making final revisions, listening to the rain softly patter on my blue tin roof.

The following remarks are adapted from an open letter I began drafting shortly after visiting a Genocide memorial with other WorldTeach volunteers in early January 2010. The impulse to write the letter was intense disgust, but it became a familiar crutch to revisit during my service last year – a reminder of Rwanda’s extraordinary context. I wrote and rewrote the letter for most of last year before submitting it to WorldTeach administrators, returning every few weeks to reassess my feelings. I’m sharing my thoughts here not because I think they are particularly unique or insightful, but because my perspective now isn’t part of any ‘Rwanda’ discussion I ever had. I also hope the letter will be included in future orientation sessions should WorldTeach return to Rwanda.

The Catholic church at Nyamata is located on an unpaved side road about a mile from the bus stop in Nyamata’s town center, off the main road running south from Kigali towards Kirundo and the Burundian border. At the time of our visit, the dusty dirt road wound past homes, a sleepy police station, an expanding school with half-built buildings, and seemingly vacant Caritas offices. At a crossroads, the church appeared ringed with high metal fences painted a brilliant bright white. The grounds, as at the Kigali Memorial Center, were immaculately kept with precisely trimmed green grass, neat rows of bright perennials, and showy palm trees.

Two Rwandese men greeted us at the entrance and led two groups through the church in broken but understandable English. It quickly became clear that both men were survivors of local massacres fifteen years ago. In 1994, thousands of mostly Tutsi crowded into the church and the immediate surroundings, hoping the church would bring protection. Nearly every single man, woman, and child was murdered.

The church itself is chilling. Inside it is filled with old wooden pews heaped with the muddy clothes of the victims. During our visit, an odd atmospheric light filtered in through the back of the church, and a heavy, humid, still air hung over everything. The interior was silent save for the guide’s hushed voice and insects buzzing and birds chirping noisily overhead. The tin roof and concrete floor are clearly pockmarked with grenade blasts. Oxidized blood stains are still visible on the ceiling and walls. In one section of the church, children’s clothes are piled onto the floor where children under four were mercilessly slaughtered. At the altar, one survivor recounted the brutal mutilation and murder of a Hutu woman and her Tutsi husband. A vault for a mass grave sits underneath the church, and large mass grave chambers are located outside behind the church where coffins and bones are stacked meters deep. Cracked and crushed skulls, reconstructed after exhumation, and tattered identity cards are irrefutable evidence of the overwhelming cruelty that characterized the killings.

The scale of death at Nyamata is paralyzing and truly terrifying. I could not finish the tour. Being confronted with Nyamata, the need to seriously reassess how to think about the Rwandan genocide became clear. Sitting outside the church as I waited for the rest of the volunteers to conclude the tour, I struggled to justify visiting the church. I felt ashamed, sad, and regretful that I had traveled to the memorial site. To be perfectly frank, visiting Nyamata was not enlightening. The church is a crime scene and a grave, not a museum. I realized, too late, what a naïve and macabre farce it is to need to see a crime scene or grave to believe mass murders should be prevented.

What’s more, attempting to pay homage to those who died there seemed to me empty and trite. Nyamata holds no connections; I neither knew any of the victims, nor understand the pain of the survivors. In reality, I felt as an interlocutor, a voyeur, an atrocity tourist invading the memory of Nyamata and its residents for no good reason. The church is their memorial, a place to teach their children, a place to remember their dead.

Visiting Nyamata only reinforced the distance and detachment I have to the crimes of 1994 and genocide. Platitudes about genocide’s debasement of humanity hide an ugly truth: genocide has always terrorized particular men, women, and children, who, forgotten by the world, each die a very personal death or suffer some other terrible trauma. I fear genocide’s victims are not only dehumanized by its perpetrators, but also necessarily dehumanized by passive bystanders. Either way, genocide does not affirm humanity, it unequivocally denies it. Accordingly, calling genocide an affront to all of humanity seems to me a cruel joke perpetrated by people untouched by such depraved violence – who can rightly own genocide without paying a terrible price? And that price cannot be paid by traveling to far-flung memorials to the dead, regardless of the country or crime. I know this will not inherently strengthen my resolve to help prevent future crimes. If such resolve is to be genuine and actionable, I believe it must be an intrinsic and unshakable moral imperative, not developed through some emotive learning exercise. After all, Nyamata is a searing condemnation of humanity’s collective inaction and refusal to “learn.”

Today, the Rwanda of 1994 seems both distant and immediate. Kigali bustles with orderly energy and has a friendly vibe. Business does well, crime is low, education and technology are priorities, and people are outwardly eager to improve their lives and better themselves. But in the evening, as traffic quiets and all that remains are the twittering birds, the buzzing insects, and the soft rustle of a moist cool breeze, I must resist feeling transported to 1994. I must resist the impactful images from Nyamata which gnaw at my consciousness, and I must resist grasping at comprehension, as the mind tries to distill the fear and blood of seventeen years ago. I must resist trying to purposefully identify with the victims and the perpetrators. It’s not easy. As distinctly social creatures, I believe we seek out experiences which help us identify with others, but I’ve learned to be very wary of such feelings.

Reflective speculation is a poor substitute for action and responsibility. “Never again” was never so empty as in Rwanda. Most Rwandans know this and will suffer the consequences of the world’s inaction for generations. I understand that Rwandans’ relationship with the genocide is complex, and the appalling absence of intervention by the rest of the world in 1994 compounded existing mistrust of western governments and foreigners. These feelings are neither uniform nor universal, and are seldom publicly shown, but I have learned to expect them. I must accept them as a subtext of teaching and be cautious not to project my own biases onto them. I must also understand that there is more to being an outsider than nationality, skin tone, and language. Some experiences are not transferable, and perhaps they are best left that way.

Cocktails and Chinese Chicken.

I often receive compositions dotted with awkward phrases produced by cultural ignorance. That the sophistication of students’ written work reflects their limited personal experiences is unsurprising because we use what we perceive and cache in our memory. However, it can detract from the overall quality of their writing.

A very fluent student recently wrote an excellent composition about a man and a woman sharing an intimate dinner at a fancy restaurant. The setting was sumptuous, and each image fit very well with its companions, except for one glaring exception: when the meal arrived, the couple was having cocktails and fried Chinese chicken. There was no previous indication the restaurant was Chinese, and I can’t ever remember imbibing martinis while enjoying General Tsao’s chicken. It was enough to upset the balanced picture the student had so carefully crafted. At first it was hilarious, but it quickly became sobering.

This condition is directly connected to my students’ media consumption habits, reading in particular. Because Rwanda does not have a reading culture, students miss invaluable opportunities to expand their vocabularies and develop greater cultural nuance in their writing. The result is a worldview defined by too much television and too little literature, too many Youtube clips and too few bedtime stories, too many Victoria Beckhams and too few V.S. Naipuls, and this really concerns me.

The act of reading is a crucial part of child and adolescent development. Reading sustains our ability to think, and thus write, coherently. It teaches us to be careful consumers of information. It opens young minds to language’s creative possibilities. Without a culture of reading, my students are robbed of important opportunities to mature into thoughtful well-rounded adults, and instead they assault themselves with raunchy hip-hop music videos, banal reality television, and seizure-inducing advertising. For this reason I am contemplating issuing an open letter to parents next school year encouraging them to make reading an important part of students’ home life. Moral of the story: Read a book for everyone’s sake!

news bits...

The world has certainly taken an inauspicious turn in the past month. I apologize for the long absence. Work, news, and writer's block occupied my time.

The Middle East and North Africa continues to smolder and ignite piecemeal. So much to follow, so little time! Military intervention (always incredibly risky business) against Libya, violent crackdowns in the Persian gulf region, and a referendum in Egypt. Honestly, just stay tuned to Al Jazeera.

Japan’s devastation is shocking and tragic, and my thoughts have been with the many Japanese volunteers I’ve met here in Rwanda and their families back home. However, please be mindful about who you give to should you choose to support the relief efforts. The reality is Japan has among the best, if not the best, disaster response systems and personnel in the world. Also, keep in mind that Japan is not the only crisis in the world today. Many others, from Pakistan and Ethiopia to New Zealand and Haiti, are facing the terrible consequences of natural disasters.

In Africa, Nigeria, Sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous country, is preparing for presidential elections this year. AllAfrica has a nice webpage with lots of content. Nigeria’s immense resources, regional and continental influence, and history of conflict probably make these elections among the most important in the world this year. They certainly are up there with DRC’s election scheduled for the fall.

Concerning Rwanda, Think Africa Press has an incredibly interesting article on the Gacaca traditional courts handling the vast majority of genocide crimes. The interview is with a well-known professor at SOAS whose research on Gacaca (pronounced Ga-Cha-Cha) and general take on Rwanda seem very balanced and fair to me. Lots of progress, just as many problems, and no easy solutions.

Meanwhile, MTN continues to make life easier for tech savvy Rwandans and foreign residents, this time to keep that cash power topped up.

A New Times editorial whines about Libya, predictably. Everything's going well until that last little bit, where Gaddafi’s forty-year dictatorship is described cursorily as “a legitimate government which should enjoy the fruits of sovereignty.” No doubt the military intervention is problematic and cynical, but it’s a bit rich coming from the NT. I wasn’t aware that legitimacy was conferred by totalitarianism and graft.

In entertainment news, Pinetop Perkins, Boogie Woogie master, died yesterday at 96. He will be missed but forever a cherished part of my iTunes library.

Generalizing about generalizations.

Continuing the discussion about students’ writing, I had a revelation recently. I noticed a peculiar speaking habit among Rwandese that might help explain some of the difficulties I have with students’ writing. During a field trip with seventh graders to the Rwandan Information Office’s (ORINFOR) printing facilities and print newsroom, speakers repeatedly answered categorical or broad questions with rather specific examples. They often elaborated on these examples, straying further from the original idea the student probed.

I don’t know why it had never occurred to me, but this seems a common practice among Rwandese. No generalization is made, rather examples are proffered. I wondered if this trait was due to inability, unwillingness, or reasoned conscious decision and whether making generalizations or not, either initially or from an example, was indicative of education.

Admittedly making generalizations often requires inductive reasoning. We move from examples to generalizations because it’s practical. I am right now using inductive reasoning to make my own generalization about Rwandese from a vault of personal anecdotes. Although inductive reasoning is not perfect because it is technically impossible to justify, it’s often our only means of categorizing or distilling large amounts of information.

It seems sensible that the speakers at ORINFOR would use their examples to form generalizations, but why not think about the example and respond with a generalization? Perhaps the generalization didn’t occur to them, or maybe they expected students to make the connections themselves. Regardless, general answers to general questions were few and far between. In the ORINFOR scenario, I didn’t find it particularly troubling or inappropriate, but in other instances this habit can be problematic. It will certainly hamper my students on their IGCSE exams.

I suspect this habit has deep cultural and linguistic roots in the ways Rwandese communicate, but what those roots are remain a mystery to me. However, education must play some role. I often find myself politely badgering students with barrages of interconnected questions, trying to develop their ability to form generalizations themselves. If we have three examples of a character’s actions, what generalizations can we make about his or her personality? If we have seven textual details about a landscape, what generalizations can we make about the climate and geography imagined by the author? The Socratic dialogue often annoys students, but I believe it’s constructive. It’s precisely this type of method which was so tough in Nyagatare last year.

Jumping to more elaborate conclusions, what are the important cognitive implications of this ill-supported observation? Moving in this direction always risks political incorrectness. Who am I to question the autonomy and cognition of Rwandese? What right or standing do I have to judge? Images of condescending white colonialists pontificating about black Africans’ intelligence should spring to mind.

Obviously I have no proof, from a social science perspective, of any of my generalizations. Not of the trait, nor of its origins. But I can’t help escape the persistent alarm bells ringing in my head. My observations are in fact neither novel nor particularly defamatory. The Rwandan government itself has identified the population’s passivity, deference to authority (bleh), and historically poor education as sources of past conflict and barriers to future economic growth and socio-political stability. Rwandese’s characteristic passivity could account for many of the challenges I face using the Socratic method in the classroom. For the time being, I will be left wondering why some Rwandese have such difficulty engaging in lively discussions and transcending narrow perspectives often defined by exceptional or irrelevant examples, and others do not.

Channeling Orwell in my classroom.

In my new teaching position, I am preparing tenth grade students for an international exam set and marked by a division of Cambridge University. The exam demands clarity, precision, and deliberation from students, and as a teacher, this requires an intense amount of critical thought and focus inside and outside of the classroom. The more vague, disorganized, and lackluster the work I receive, the more strident the comments I make. I dissect and revise each composition’s cancerous organs while extolling the virtues of George Orwell’s seminal article Politics and the English Language, which remains a refreshingly intelligent and honest critique of abstraction and staleness in modern English.

As an upshot, I identify in Orwell’s words many bad habits in my own writing, and I hone the edge of this new awareness on the whetstone of my students’ work. In the classroom I ask, “Why?” or “What does that actually mean?” at every opportunity, and these mental calisthenics benefit my own writing. However, I do secretly fear I am developing a screechy tick about economy of language, and unfortunately many students shrink from my zeal.

Orwell believed insincere language was corroding modern English because political language, which can only be understood as conscious attempts to muddle the truth or worse, was infectious and self-perpetuating. This decay springs from jargon, which destroys clarity and precision, and euphemism, which numbs visceral reactions to concrete actualities. Dead and maimed children become ‘collateral damage,’ torture becomes ‘enhanced interrogation,’ kidnapping becomes ‘rendition,’ arbitrary arrests and persecution become ‘enhanced security,’ human beings become ‘cockroaches.’ In Orwellian terms, modern English is a dangerous sham.

Rwanda is no stranger to jargon. Colonialism, imperialism, and the state post-independence have all relied on jargon. Violent and repressive policies require jargon because, as Orwell notes, precise language evokes graphically disturbing mental images. When imperialists, for example, spoke honestly, the effect of their words is chilling to contemporary ears. In the introduction to his book When Victims Become Killers, Mahmood Mamdani excerpts a passage from the German military publication Der Kämpf describing the violent suppression of the Herero population in German Southwest Africa at the hands of General Lothar von Trotha:

No efforts, no hardships were spared in order to deprive the enemy of his last reserves of resistance; like a half-dead animal he was hunted from water-hole to water-hole until he became a lethargic victim of the nature of his own country. The waterless Omaheke was to complete the work of the German arms: the annihilation of the Herero people.

Before Southwest Africa, Trotha had experience crushing resistance in German East Africa, including Rwanda. The excerpt’s brutal imagery of the Herero’s extermination is shocking to today’s reader, but it still relies on a common trick of political language. The Herero population was sub-human, described as a “half-dead animal” which was hunted by the German military, as if the Schutztruppe were on safari.

Today colonialism’s residue still fouls Africa. The stench now wafts from development aid, international financial instruments, propped-up autocrats, and unfair trade conditions. Even a cursory reading of reports from some of these foreign organizations reveals an unsettling reliance on meaningless pretense. For a pointed satire of this problem, see here. This affected language is designed to bolster an organization’s authority, but I think it makes them sound ridiculous. Basic materials, stuff in other words, become ‘modalities,’ do or enact becomes ‘operationlize,’ detail becomes ‘granularity,’ and so on. The important peculiarities of everyday work in Rwanda and other African states become obscured by this fluffy self-important jargon, while African solutions to African problems remain undervalued and dependency persists. Old urges have simply been rebranded in technocratic gobbledygook.

In my classroom, the Cambridge exams give students the opportunity to sharpen their mental defenses against such nonsense. I can only continue working with students to emphasize the necessity of quality writing, and more importantly, honest thought.

news bits...

Although I have been following many different stories from the African continent this week, none has been more exciting and compelling than Egypt's radical transformation. We ought to remind ourselves that freedom and liberty are not reserved for certain individuals and societies. I'm also closely following events in Iran (you should too!).

Some other news from around Africa I'm following in addition to protests in the Middle East and North Africa:

Ugandans go to the polls shortly amidst unrest to the north. The Independent (UG) has a helpful article on the politics involved.

Within the aid and development blogging community, there has been a small firestorm over World Vision's partnership with the NFL to ship shirts to developing countries, including Zambia. The whole concept underpinning the move by World Vision is stupid, wasteful, and ineffective.

Opposition leaders in the Democratic Republic of the Congo do not seem ready to unite under one candidate. This means President Kabila's recent electoral "reforms" could pay off.


Rwanda has established a new authority titled The Rwanda Geology and Mines Authority (OGMR) whose purpose is to reduce trade in illegal (i.e. "conflict") minerals originating from the DRC (and exported as Rwandan?). President Kabila's imposed ban on trade in Congolese minerals has also had adverse effects on the market. Still, I doubt tracing initiatives will do anything to staunch violence, instability, and poverty in the DRC. See here and here for some helpful articulation. UN guidelines can be found here.

Maggie has a brief collection of links about the Southern Sudanese referendum conclusion. Some accounts cite 99% approval for secession.

Meanwhile, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir proves he's got gumption. He ought to -- he's a head of state and an indicted war criminal.

African leaders, including South African President Jacob Zuma, are heading to Cote d'Ivoire for talks on the continuing political deadlock there. The South African government has taken a neutral stance on the situation.

Lastly, now former Rwandan Minister of Culture and Sports Joseph Habineza resigned this week citing personal reasons. Apparently inappropriate snaps were circulated on the internet, prompting his resignation. I have not seen the pictures, nor do I care to. Keep those flies zipped and trousers on.