The Beautiful Tree by James Tooley Read Free Book Online Page B

in the classrooms. I couldn’t wait to see what they would find.
    But what about Africa? Would I find the same things there? One of the first countries I visited for the research was Nigeria. I’d called universities and think tanks across sub-Saharan Africa, asking for research partners to help me in my work. The proposal from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria’s premier university, in association with a Lagos-based think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Analysis, seemed particularly interesting. I couldn’t wait to visit, to see whether I would also find private schools for the poor in that country.

3. A Puff of Logic, Nigeria

The Nigerian Ex-Chief Inspector
    I first met Dennis Okoro in July 2003 at an education and development conference in London. Dennis was recently retired as chief inspector of schools for the Nigerian federal government. He was a charming, warm man with a soft, lilting voice and shiny bald head, who looked very much younger than his 67 years. Over a beer, I told him that I wanted to research private schools in poor areas of Lagos. He dismissed this idea straightaway: “There are no private schools for the poor. In Nigeria, private schools are only for the elite.” The only problem here was that a month before, I visited Nigeria to meet with the University of Ibadan team; we went into the slums of Lagos and found private schools—everywhere, just as in India. (I’d been really excited by my find. The Ibadan team had been very surprised; they had been skeptical about finding any schools like the ones I’d found in India, and had in fact agreed to the research because they knew they would find very little. Now after our preliminary visits, we’d signed a contract and they were ready to get started on the detailed research.) It was a difficult situation to handle. One wants to be respectful of elders; above all, one doesn’t want to appear arrogant—“I’m saying I know your country, educationally speaking, better than you do, although you were chief education inspector for 10 years, and I’ve only visited once.”
    So I pussyfooted around the issue: “I’ve found private schools in the slums of Hyderabad, won’t they also be in Lagos?” No, he was adamant: “You might find some charities helping out, but no private schools. Public schools are for the poor.” Sensing my disappointment, he then hit on the solution: “Ah! It’s a problem of definition. In your country, you call your elite private schools ‘public’ schools, but our public schools are government schools. So it’s a matter of terminology. They’re not private, but government schools in the slums.” Quod erat demonstrandum. For Mr. Okoro, the puzzle of these oxymoronic private schools for the poor “promptly vanished in a puff of logic.” Steeped in our quaint British terminology, I’d been told that these schools I’d come across in the slums were “public” schools, and had assumed that this meant private schools. Elementary, my dear Watson.
    I could see that there was no convincing him. I’d seen for myself something in his country and in other places too. He said they definitely weren’t there, not in Nigeria and, by implication, not in any other country. So I dropped the issue and we went on to other matters, and further beers.

Makoko
    A week after my conversation with Dennis Okoro, I was in a taxicab winding slowly through snarled traffic over the low, sweeping highway viaduct to Lagos Island and then to Victoria Island. I peered through the window, as so many visitors must do, at the shantytown sprawling out into the waters below. Wood huts on stilts stretched into the lagoon until they met the line of high pylons, where they abruptly stopped. Young men punted dugouts, skillfully maneuvering their long poles over and into the water; women paddled canoes full of produce down into the narrow canals between the raised houses; teenage boys stood on rocks in the water and cast their fine nets; large