By Amoto Ndiewo
When Ahmed Mohamed Khere was transferred to head Abdisamed Primary School at the beginning of this term, the enrolment was 30 boys and 32 girls. It is sharp contrast with Tahafid Quran Memorization School in the same locality, which has 81 boys and 7 girls.
That disparity made Khere contact Abdisamed area Chief Yusuf Adan. The two leaders agreed to hold an all-inclusive stakeholder meeting. So the chief invited parents and teachers to an ad hoc meeting in the school.
Khere recalls it took a while and a series of such meetings to convince Tahafid teachers and parents to agree to release their pupils to attend secular school. He clarifies that while CBC primary schools only allows learners between 3 and 12 years, Quran memorization schools have no age limit.
“On June 10, 2022, we welcomed the first batch of 15 CBC-compliant children in school,’’ a delighted Khere told Education News in his office in Abdisamed in Mbalambala Sub-county.
Basking in the hope that the newly enrolled learners won’t be lured into livestock herding like hundreds of others, Khere celebrates the few as an icebreaker.
‘’After all a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,’’ said Khere, who regrets that despite Tahafid’s importance, only 38 learners were in the eligible age bracket to join CBC classes.
‘’The other 50 will have to proceed with Quran memorization and miss secular schooling,’’ lamented Khere.
Mbalambala Quality Assurance Sub-county Director Abdrashid Muktar explained that since CBC is competency-based, there is an age limit in admission.
He quotes Gabrielle Lusser Rico, a writer and researcher who said children go through three major phases as their minds develop.
The first stage is the Innocent Phase (2-7 years) where the right brain dominates. A child feels much wonder, emotion, curiosity, and delight in the patterns around them.
The Convectional Phase takes over at 6-16 years and the left brain begins to dominate. Thinking is more bound by rules, habits, realism, convectional patterns and clichés.
Lastly, the Cultured Phase takes shape at 17 and above. There is increased cooperation and orchestration between right and left hemispheres. Imaginative and intuitive functions are dominant.
Rashid synthesizes that the right brain specializes in the kind of thinking that makes children so fresh and creative.
“They think in images, in comparison, in emotions and pictures and rhythms,’’ Muktar said, adding that the left brain specializes in the kind of thinking that are more emphasized in school as one grows older. It deals with information, analysis, detail, rules, logic, grammar and language.
He goes on: ‘’the right brain perceives words as verbal signs whereas the left brain perceive them as rhythmic, artful patterns,’’ clarified Muktar.
That notwithstanding, the cultural belief that girls are weaker still sits with the residents.
Khere told Education News that due to that erroneous local belief, parents in Abdisamed prefer taking weaker and stubborn children to school.
Caleb Alembi, a teacher in Dujis, says it is common to hear parents shout to their rude children to ‘’go and disturb” teachers in school because they are paid for that.
He explains that whereas brighter and stronger children juggle between Quran memorization lessons and livestock herding lifestyles, the weaker ones are hobbled between secular education and housework.
‘’In a rural setup a girl is trained in housework from a tender age and married young,’’ said Alembi.
Khere hopes his maiden junior secondary exam candidates will overcome this curse and fair better than their rural peers.
