Learning in English: An uphill struggle

If your lesson's a bit boring at Nansato Primary School, look out of the window. To the west are the flat scrubby plains of the Rift Valley stretching out endlessly across Southern Malawi. A child sitting on the other side of the classroom sees something very different. Rising out of the maize-fields as if from nothing, the sheer rock face of Mulanje Mountain surges to the heavens and is encircled by clouds. 'Mulanje' means 'Island in the sky' and its highest peak, 'Sapitwa' translates simply as 'Don't go there!'

The teacher won't need visual aids for this lesson, on the mountains of Southern Africa. Star pupil Maxwell answers his first question: "Sir, Kilimanjaro is located in Kenya." The teacher runs over the next few – the Drakensburg, Mount Kenya, Ruwenzori. The class is doing well. He comes to 'Mulanje' and decides to have a bit of fun. "Where is Mulanje Mountain located?" he asks with rather overstated seriousness. Hands pop up around the classroom. Everybody gets the joke and the teacher grins broadly. He asks again, and by now every hand is up, as high as they can reach, except Muliya, one of the quieter girls in the class. She waits blankly to write down the answer when it comes.

"Muliya," the teacher asks playfully, "where is Mulanje Mountain located?" Muliya does not meet his eye, does not acknowledge the question. The teacher points out of the window, straight at Mulanje: "Where is Mulanje Mountain located?" Still, Muliya is blank and all the finger pointing just makes her more confused. Eventually she concedes "I don't know" and the whole class erupts into laughter.

The teacher isn't laughing. For the last year he has been teaching Muliya and her 45 classmates in preparation for their secondary school entrance exams, the most significant academic tests they will ever sit. He has taught them Maths, Agriculture, Science, Social Studies and English – all taught and examined in English. The only subject not taught in English is Chichewa, the local language. Muliya might not be the brightest in the class, but her inability to answer such an easy question is worrying. Her spoken English is limited to very basic phrases and her written ability in the language is scarcely better.

Faced with an exam in English, Muliya, and probably around 70% of her classmates, will answer the paper using a range of techniques from basic word association to simple guesswork, mentally selecting small passages of memorised textbook and providing these as answers, almost at random. One mock-exam candidate in the same class, asked to name three political parties in Malawi, listed "maize, cassava and groundnuts". Sure, the pupil had probably been told all about Malawi's political parties, but maybe nobody told him, in Chichewa, what a political party actually is.

In actual English lessons, the pupils are being taught rudimentary vocabulary and grammar, yet after break they are expected to learn about Malawi's complex colonial history when it is explained to them only in English. Enough will put in the effort needed to memorise all the facts and regurgitate them effectively on exam day to tell the government that this generation knows all about Sir Harry Johnstone and his chums, but, like so much of the Malawian education system, the kids themselves will be none the wiser as a result.

This language barrier, which stands in every classroom in the country, is an utterly pernicious influence, eating away at an education system which cannot afford inefficiencies. Everything a Malawian child learns in school is important – for most, an education is the only valuable thing they will ever have been given – but some stuff is critical. Because of the looming exams, the kids learn about crop rotation, irrigation and commercial farming in English. Every child in the class is from a family of subsistence farmers.

In a country where famine is a persistent threat, where everyone still bleaches their maize in the sun (drying out most of the nutrients), where most commercial farming remains a whites-only activity and where most local farmers rely on a single crop cycle when they could manage three with the right irrigation, it might just be better if kids were taught about agricultural techniques in a language that they could understand. The irony of these classes is that the only children who actually understand the ideas will be the ones who will learn their way out of subsistence farming.

It's when it comes to sex education and Aids awareness that the problem is really alarming. Imagine a British pupil learning about the birds and the bees – in French. Now inflate Britain's HIV/Aids prevalence well past 25% and you might start to understand the peril into which Malawi is casting its new generation and its greatest hope.

Amongst the UN Millennium Development Goals are the noble aims of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, combating HIV/Aids and ensuring environmental sustainability. It seems inconceivable that Malawi can fulfil the UN's promise while its schoolchildren continue to be baffled by the education system.

At Nansato Primary school there are always a lot of raised hands offering answers. What you will never see is a hand raised with a question, even the most basic – "I don't understand, Sir, can you explain that bit again?" The result is an endemic willingness, amongst teachers and pupils alike, to accept that most of the children will be unable to grasp the majority of what they are taught. Malawian children need to be given a voice – their own, Chichewa voice – if they are ever going to be able to ask the right questions.