Mutsinzi, I am your father: The Revenge of the Mic-Eaters

Yesterday our debate team competed against another high-performing school in Eastern Province, Kayonza Modern School. Unfortunately, Evan, who is the debate club sponsor, and myself, the annoying sidekick, had only one day to prepare our students. Due to some avoidable confusion our students had only one day to prepare for the debate, the motion being: “Privatization should be encouraged in Rwanda.”

Kayonza, unlike Nyagatare S.S., offers students arts concentrations like HEG (= history + economics + geography). This meant their students had another distinct advantage over our students. In a country where education is predominantly directed solely towards two different national exams, one’s knowledge is geared specifically towards passing those exams. That means rote memorization is a key component of your academic development. Our kids study sciences, their kids study economics. So, it was unsurprising that they outperformed us.

What remained painfully obvious, however, in the brief snatches of back-and-forth I could gather from the rear of the dining hall was that critical thinking and worldly exposure remains a distinct problem regardless of your school. Sure, the Kayonza students spouted off a fair amount of theoretically viable economic theories for the adoption of more privatization-friendly policy. They also spouted off a fair amount of unsubstantiated babble, just as our students did. But most remarkably for a debate, there was a serious dearth of detailed examples, applicable anecdotes, or statistics to substantiate any of the claims either team made.

This is the challenge: to initiate a learning process of self-exploration and contemplative reflection on one’s own ideas in a bunch of students who have no idea how valuable those skills are, and, to be honest, don’t really need them to graduate and go to university. If I can get even a fraction of my students to increase their capacity to think critically in whatever time I may have remaining here at Nsheke, then I will be happy. But not satisfied.

What’s more, even if the kids had been using their noggins, we wouldn’t have heard it. They often have wildly exaggerated speaking styles characterized most notably by their near consumption of the microphone. I thought for the briefest of moments yesterday one girl was having an asthma attack as she exploded into the microphone. It sounded uncannily like Vader threatening some peon in the Death Star, only the peons were my students.