I have a theory on why most of the SOS children do not perform well in school. My theory is that the education structure does not encourage individualism. Take this, you live all your life in the village, you go to the village kindergarten, the SOS Primary school, The SOS high school and then maybe the SOS College, or even the SOS technical school. Note that most of the formative years are spent in SOS institutions. I cannot say this about the present moment but when I attended SOS education institutions, I was always an SOS child, even if I did something as an individual; it was termed “SOS children’s behavior”.
I am not against SOS education institutions per se; I only feel that their effectiveness is not felt because there is little separation of the children’s lives from their school life. Imagine going to a school where all the teachers know all the details about your family. They have preconceived ideas about your character, your ability, your personality, even the expected performance in school. Tell me how objective can someone be if they already have an impression of who you are. The image the village father and mother present of the child is exactly what they present to the teachers and more often than naught, the children do not disappoint. They turn out exactly as presented.
Ever heard of the story of the student who came to class late, found a problem on the board, copied it down and went home and tried to solve it? He brought his answer to class and the teacher did not know what to say, because before the student came to class he had already told the rest of the class that it was not solvable. The student did not hear that and that is why he went on to solve it. Moral; let us have better expectations of the SOS children and see if that changes anything. Separate home life and school life and see what happens. It worked for the church and state. Why can’t it work here?
It took me a long time to learn who I am as an individual, since I always was an SOS child in everyone’s eyes. I feel the “individualization of the child” is a concept that should be encouraged in the SOS institutions. I think that the term SOS child is situational. We are SOS children by virtue of being under the care of SOS. I wonder if anyone recalls the time when we dreaded going to the SOS Primary school (Poly), this was an SOS institution and yet we were the most terrorized group of students there. It was not enough that the school was strict to the point of being ridiculous (we were too busy trying to avoid the canes to learn, it is the only school I was ever forced to copy assignments). I digress; all I would like to point out is that behind all those colored t-shirts written SOS, behind all those noisy kids at play, behind all those naughty kids swimming in the tanks or climbing trees are individuals and that is what we should see first.
I am against this idea of herding SOS children and having the same expectation from them in terms of how they think, how they behave, what they want out of their lives, the careers they want to pursue etc. I agree that there are common habits that we form as members of the SOS community, but let us not limit the characters of the individuals to fit onto the box. When we were young, there were several fruit-stealing incidences, most of which were followed by what I would call kangaroo courts by virtue of their lengths, presided by the village father to fish out the culprits. This of course required beating the kids known not to have perseverance for the cane. Would it be right therefore to say all the kids stole fruits? No. Then why did one teacher once say “If any one’s food is stolen, an SOS child is likely to be the culprit”? I am afraid at the time this was taken by its face value and I even remember laughing it off. Now that I am older and wiser, I feel that comments like these should be taken seriously and prevented at all cost because little by little, we start believing what they imply and even act them out to some extent since we know that they are expected behavior.
Today’s challenge
Acknowledge a child as an individual today by asking these simple questions.
What did you learn in school today?
What do you like doing most?
Who is the most important person in your life?
What do you want to be when you grow up?
Feel free to add to the list.
