The sound of children's voicesreciting in unison could be heard from afar, as our missionapproached a school in rural Cambodia. Inside a second-gradeclassroom, students took turns at the blackboard. Onepointed with a stick at a list of words written by theteacher, while the rest recited. A colleague approached,wrote on the blackboard the same words in a different order,and asked the children to read. Suddenly, there was silence.Most kids had merely memorized the sequence of the words andcould not even identify single letters. This scene isfrequent. In the poorer schools of low-income countries,many students remain illiterate for years, until theyfinally drop out. With some care, the process is observable.Typically the teacher writes on the board some letters orwords and asks students to repeat them. The letters may bescribbled, the children often sit at a distance, textbooksmay be insufficient, and children may not have anyone athome to help them read. But they do repeat the words inunison, getting cues from a few knowledgeable classmates.The teachers stand by the blackboard, address students atlarge, and call on the few who perform well. How come thisissue has not attracted attention? One reason is that in themiddle-class schools of capitals students perform muchbetter. Soon after our rural observations, we observedsecond graders in a middleclass school of Pnom Penh fluentlyhandling the extremely complex Khmer script. However, theschools of the poor have less time for their students. Thereis teacher absenteeism, a lack of textbooks to take home,parental inability to make up for school weaknesses, nospecific curricular time for reading. The result has beenchronic illiteracy, high dropout and high repetition rates.To reduce repetition and maximize enrollments, some donorsadvise governments to promote students automatically.
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