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How a wise illiterate is better than an ignorant elite.

A wise illiterate is in many ways much better than an ignorant elite.

In this piece, I will share with you my experience starting a community school and the lessons I learnt along the way.

Opening a school is the easiest part of starting a community school.

That is why several community initiated schools have not lasted more than 3 years.

In 2025,  St. Sylvester Nursery & Primary School in Nwoya district will be celebrating 10 years of vivid existence.

I will also share with you, my hard earned lessons from the wisdom of illiterate villagers on project sustainability.

The first years of our existence was full of excitement for both proprietor and parents.

While my intention was to have only grade 1 nursery learners; parents insisted that I must open grade 2 as well.

I argued that we need to plan and prepare for grade 2 to have systemactic growth.

Despite my pleas, on the first day of school; I realized parents had registered 16 grade 2 learners.

I could not chase them away. That marked the beginning of a sharp learning curve on bottom up approach strategy in project management.

In the eyes of the parents, the new school Dirctor doesn’t get it but we will do what is right for us, within the context respectfully.

I was adamant about this unplanned growth because I was jobless and it meant more resources.

I had to recruit a new teacher for grade 2 and initiate team teaching in my single doorless and windowless classroom.

This decision widened the holes in my pockets to afford salaries for two professionally trained nursery school teachers.

To address this unforeseen startup challenge, I had to identify senior four school dropouts and enrol them in a weekend nursery teacher training center at Koch Goma, a nearby town in Nwoya district.

One of my biggest challenges was that none of the parents paid full fees at the beginning of the term.

Therefore, unlicensed teachers were cheaper and enrolling them for further studies was to motivate them to work for the duration of the 2 years of their studies as I settled.

The nursery teacher training center, just like my school accepted partial payments.

So, I paid their fees during harvest season when my parents had also sold their harvest and paid up their children’s fees.

In the third year, I started experiencing increased teacher turnovers and negative narratives about the school.

To this day, I still remember my headteacher’s husband dancing and jubilating to the amusement of parents in one occassion when I announced that our headteacher had completed her nursery teacher training course.

” My wife even looks more beautiful as an educated teacher and not just a farmer from the garden,” he poked fellow parents in his speech.

It would be the last time,I would see them in my school.

All efforts to reach her at the beginning of the new year school opening was futile.

Midway through the first term of our third year, the second teacher disappeared from the school and her home.

I called for a Parents Teachers Association (PTA) meeting to addressing some serious underlying allegations about the school and teacher turn overs.

Everytime, I visited a nearby center, drunkards kept mumbling and rumbling allegations that the school was only graduating with divorce certificates.

It bothered me but I could not address drunkards in their joints on school matters hence the PTA meeting.

The school recruitment policy was inline with my idea of developing my community.

Priority was to be given to the village before sourcing outside the village.

Everytime, I emphasized the school recruitment policy; parents offered me emotionless flat faces.

In my mind, I assumed parents didn’t understand the policy hence the need for more emphasis.

So, I dragged this local development ideology down their throats with graphical stories of poverty and underdevelopment in the village.

It was until this PTA meeting that I realized I had been negligent and a poor listener.

I had not paid attention to their silence. I mistook silence for consent.

During the meeting parents opened up about certain young boda boda parents and Produce (cereal) dealers visiting the school and disrupting learning.

I had heard this but didn’t see a problem with parents dropping their children on a boda boda and visiting the school regularly.

Boda boda parents and Produce dealers were parents with money and easily paid fees.

As sole traders, they had alot of time while farmers kept in their gardens for most of the day.

I proudly feed my teachers and learners well compared to their family diets. We change diet, paste and fry food every day and its always enough.

I ensured my teachers compulsorily dressed up for school in their would be sunday wears & bought them customized school Tshirts.

It was just obvious but I had not noticed that every lifestyle change comes with its opportunities and challenges. My female teachers looked better and more attractive.

The boda boda men and Produce dealers started delaying their visits in school to impress my teachers.

It now made sense why parents persistently asked me to recruit male teachers yet I know ladies work better with children.

Neibouring school owners noticed I had a vulnerability. While I had good teachers, I paid them little.

So, they turned my school to a recruitment center until parents stopped the school culture of supporting teachers further their education.

They negotiated and won the arguement that only teachers with licenses would be recruited.

It now made sense why my teacher turn over rates were increasing. Their new lovers relocated them.

While with us, they could not stand the embarrasment & pressure of being dated by multiple men in the same village of your husband hence prefered to leave the village to join other schools.

It was clear from the PTA meeting that the school policy to recruit locally was failing the school.

” We know these teachers from birth. We know their poor upbringing with drunken parents and unstable families. This nursery education can not change them to qualify them to educate our children” lamented a parent during the meeting.

This was a typical case of, “ a prophet having little honor in his hometown, among his relatives, & where he played as a child.”(Mark 6:4-6).

I was also embarrassed to learn after 2 years that parents protested with their silence my idea of only having grade one nursery learners because gardening was their first activity in the morning.

So, their much older children in grade 2 led their little brothers and sisters in grade 1 to school every day. It was about family alocation of duties.

I had made fundamental mistakes that could be detrimental to the opening of the school project.

Ironically, I pursued a post graduate diploma in project planning and management at Gulu University in 2008.

One of the cardinal principles of project management approach is the bottom-up strategy.

The bottom-up project management approach is a strategy that starts with the most basic details and works its way up to a comprehensive solution.

It’s a collaborative process that involves its entire stakeholders in brainstorming solutions and determining the tasks needed to achieve the project’s goals.

I have been a typical elite not using knowledge acquired from school and common sense wisdom to listen to parents, my major stakeholders in the education of their children.

I could not see the disapproval in the faces of my parents because I was blinded by the I know it all assumption of modern day elite in the context of rural settings.

I thought I was more educated and knew what I was saying, yet I needed the wisdom of these village illiterates to understand the context of my project.

I had failed to apply this education in my own project.

Having learnt the hardway, I reconstituted the school Board of Governors (BoG) elected by parents and excused all close relatives in the management of the school.

I gave the BoG full powers to govern the school and particilarly be incharge of teacher recruitment and teachers welfare while I closely supervised them.

The next term, they recruited 2 teachers from a government school but were not on government payroll.

Their salaries were generated from contributions from parents in the school.

Don’t forget, I had been promising them to recruit teachers from Gulu City but had flatly failed but could not conceed.

I considered recruiting from a neigbouring school unproffessional but to them it was how everyone did it. It was normal.

If they recruit from us, we recruit from them too and offer them better salaries and wellfare.

Is this not capitalism that we study in our colleges put to practice by illiterate villagers?

Again, I had failed to listen to them hence failure to replace teachers.

A teacher was recruited from Pader district, approximately 130 klms away from the school.

A parent offered him a hut to host his family as the school looks around to resettle him.

Last week, this teacher was awarded the best teacher of the school, 2024. I had not noticed parents traveled every where and kept an open eye for good teachers.

Is this not community ownership of a project by simply empowering parents to govern their own school?

I studied all these theories but it was the village illiterates who understood its practice better.

I admit, I surely failed the purpose of my project planning course.

Now, does it suprise you that we will celebrate 10 years of our existence in 2025?

It is all because  I learnt to listen and not impose ideas on my wise illiterate parents of my school.

No one is too educated to learn from the wisdom of an illiterate.

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Written by Aliker Martin (1)

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