A couple of weeks ago, after one of my columns on how national standards would be an important step toward improving the achievement of all our students, I got a letter from a former Peace Corps Volunteer, Tom Hebert, who is now a consultant in Washington, D.C. He offered, as a case in point, education in West Africa in the 1960s:
Ask any Peace Corps Volunteer who taught school in West Africa during the sixties about the power of a national curriculum and standards, and we will tell you that the West African School Certificate Examination program, maintained from Cambridge University in England, produced tens of thousands of high school graduates better educated than most of us American Volunteers.
My first year I taught in a poor Moslem high school. Those kids got a tough, hard education that they stood in line for. Need to discipline someone? Ask them to step outside the door, away from the learning. Of course, they knew that in this system, life failure was possible if you flunked exams .... But my poor little school, with rough floors and chickens and pigs wandering in and out, was famous for its performance in Ping-Pong and the results of the annually published West African School Certificate Examination. We taught to the classical "set curriculum" and helped produce great learners. Wole Soyinka, the 1990 Nobel Laureate for Literature, came out of a school just down the road from ours. No Nobel will come out of my high school in Seattle .... Clearly it is time for a national curriculum and standards in this country. It puts all schools, teachers and students on an equal footing.
According to an article Hebert enclosed, this rigorous education stayed with the people who got it -- and gave them pleasure. In "A West African Postcard" (RPCV Writers and Readers, November 1992), Hebert describes the 3,000-mile tour made by the University of lbadan's theatre-on-wheels in honor of Shakespeare's 400th birthday. The program, an enormous hit in villages all over Nigeria, consisted of four hours' worth of scenes from Shakespeare. Hebert, who says that the West Africa of this period contained "the most Shakespeare-literate society the world has known since 16th century London," explains the phenomenon in this way:
The School Cert mandated, among other standards, that students study five years of Shakespeare to prepare for the final examination's "set play." As a result, for several generations millions of West African kids quite literally memorized two or three of William Shakespeare's plays. (Such heroic learning was much inspired by every Nigerian's lovely use of language and the daily reality of a national life then singularly Elizabethan in the epic grandeur of its debates and tribal intrigues of power and vivid character.) At our performances thousands would mouth the lines in an audible susurrus that confounds me now as I worry over what went wrong with American schools.
The climax of the Shakespeare tour was a performance in Calabar with 3,000 pre-sold seats, which took place before two reigning monarchs:
... the lights came up on a ravishing Twelfth Night. But we were now hitting the rainy season. Two hours later, just after the scenes from Julius Caesar began, all hell broke loose .... The speaker and light towers, rigged on cement-filled wheels, began to weave .... Soon the rain was blowing dead level across the footlights. Surely, the audience would flee. But looking out we saw them rooted to their chairs . . . . Perhaps the crowd wasn't leaving because the two royal parties hadn't budged. Detailed for the job, I scampered across the field to the royal enclosure. Crouching down by his arm chair, I inquired of the Obong of Calabar, the senior of the two rulers, if he didn't think it best to call the whole thing off, so his people could find some cover. His ear cupped to catch the now unamplified words, he looked up, smiled: "Thank you. I can't leave just yet. I haven't had time to read Julius Caesar in so many years. I don't remember now how it all resulted. And I, of course, should know. Remember, how 'Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown."'
The next morning a heavy-duty tractor was engaged to unstick the stage from the field. The performance had, of course, carried on in the rain to a full, happy stadium.