Burma: Non-Governmental Buddhist Free School

Buddhist nuns-in-training. The poverty in Burma is so bad that a large number of children go live in Buddhist schools, living as mini-monks and nuns year-round, spending every night at the dormatory. Their parents cannot afford to house them and, surprisingly, to even school them because "government, public" schools are not free, even though they give outsiders the impression that they are free. There are enough cumulative small charges that are prohibitive for many families to send their children to government schools. But, the Buddhist schools are FREE. Like in Malaysia, religion does the job that government does not do. In Malaysia, the government won't school the refugee children, who are largely from Burma. So, the Christian groups school the refugee kids. In Burma, the Buddhists school the kids in poverty.

Both adult nuns and government teachers (in traditional teacher white shirts with green skirts, who must be moonlighting for extra money) do the teaching in Buddhist Free Schools.

One of the nuns as teachers

One of the youngest nuns-in-training getting clean, filtered water from a tank.

The tank was donated by Burmese Buddhists who escaped to the U.S., donating the clean water tank, perhaps to accumulate Buddhist merits for the next life.

Preschool for mini-nuns and monks. Preschool nap time. No one slept. Just a few feet away were multiple outdoor classrooms with kids chanting loudly.

The monk preschool teacher, glaring at and threatening the preschoolers if they didn't lay down and pretend to sleep.

Older students, with their sun protecting hats laid by their side, along with their signature Burmese bags used to carry their school books.

The students painstakingly copy what the teachers write on the board. Not much critical thinking promoted here, or at the government schools.

Happy nun student.

Chanting their lesson, learning in pairs.

This charming monk student, on the left, reminded me of Zander, my nephew, charming, witty, crinkly smile, and a harmless, disruptive cut-up in class.

The row of boys are standing up, chanting into the ear of the teacher on the left (the teacher is in the white shirt with jasmine-garland-laden hair). The classroom is structured with the teacher going round the room, row-by-row, listening to the chants that were memorized by the row of students, while she listened to students in other rows. It is interminably boring for those waiting long periods of time for the teacher to come, and when they see her coming, they get scared and race to memorize their chant, the closer the teacher gets to their row.

Everyone learns English from a very young age, but it's a very superficial understanding that doesn't translate well to communicating English in the real world. You can see the English above: "It is a doll" translated into Burmese below the English writing. All I know is the Burmese writing looks much more graceful and lyrical than the English version above it.

I was scared of this nun too! Check out how she wields that big cane with deft and aggressive impact. She had the younger, elementary students who were less docile than the older students. This aggressive, intimidating threat seemed to be used as the teacher as a socialization tool to whittle them into more docile, malleable chanting learners, fitting them into the square Burmese school system like she was crafting a square peg.

The teacher's glare, combined with her cane, is focused on one side of the class at a time. Turn-taking in learning as a collective group seems to be the system in Burmese elementary schools. She directs one side to chant while the other side learns the chant, then the other side takes a turn chanting, not unlike going to a Buddhist temple where there is a certain chant where one nun up front leads one half of the room in a standing chant while the other nun leads the other half of the temple in the same whispered chant in a prone, prayer position, then they take turns taking the other half's role.

A fascinating corporal punishment tool unique to Burma, or perhaps to all of Southeast Asia -- Standing in front of a room with your arms overhead, as a form of public humiliation that causes arm exhaustion. Interestingly, when you do corporal punishment in the U.S., you notice more anger on the children's faces. In Asia, especially for the more beaten-down, docile students of Burma, students laugh in these punitive moments, since anger is taboo to express towards adults, particularly adult authority figures. I suspect that the authority figures in Burma socialize the expression of protest and anger out of their child students at an early age, just like the Burmese military government has socialized any "protest" out of their populace for decades now.

This may be my favorite photo of a nun-in-training that I have taken. A look of wonder.

A bad-ass monk-in-training who refused to sit in the classroom but wandered outside in the covered raised hallways, sitting on the railings, chatting with any male friends who would periodically come out and visit him. That is one difference I noticed between the Buddhist "Free" and the Government "Public" (but really "Pay") schools -- The Buddhist Free schools give more "free"dom to the students to come and go in the classrooms and to and from school, whereas the government schools crack down with tighter control over student movement, physical location, and attention.

June 9, 2011

The Buddhists provide an education that the government won’t provide for the most poor students. In other countries, like Malaysia, NGO’s would provide an education that the government will not provide. In Burma, there are not local NGO’s and the international aid organizations like UNICEF and Save the Children do not have the ability to do so here. I am finding that the more oppressive governments in Southeast Asia do not educate the most needy in their countries, leaving other groups to fill in the gap for those in poverty. Often those who fill in the gaps are religious groups.

Outside of Mandalay, we visited a Buddhist free school taught by Buddhist nuns, monks, and volunteer government teachers. Click HERE to see what the entrance, and loud, more free-wheeling Buddhist school feels and sounds like. As the title suggests, it is truly a free school where you don’t need to pay for the small number of items the government schools make you pay for – uniforms, ceremonies, renovations, etc. -- which makes school prohibitive for so many poor children in Burma.

Even with such free schools, many poor parents still cannot afford to have their children be educated. It’s said that over half of Burma lives on $5 US a day. Many of these families feel like they cannot feed their children when times get rough. So, in Mandalay (2^nd biggest city in Burma) rural parents send their 8 year old and older children into town to live, indefinitely. These kids are serving tea and food at tea houses all over Mandalay, and at midnight you can find them exhausted, passed out asleep on the tea house tables, after they have cleaned up. Then, they are up again the next morning serving tea. These children do not get to be kids.

The kids who can still live with their families but are too poor to go to government schools can go to Buddhist free schools. We visited one in Mandalay that was busting at the seams with hundreds of students, and we visited another one filled with only 8 students at the ancient, glorious Bagaya monastery. The larger Buddhist Free School was located in the hills outside of Mandalay, in an area called Sagaing Hill populated by over 10,000 students in serious Buddhist study at monasteries in the golden stupa-studded hills. The school had young Buddhist nuns, monks, and civilians.

There was much less structure at this big Buddhist school, compared to the government schools. The government schools lock their entrance gates at 9am, not letting in latecomers. The Buddhist school let kids come and go from class as they please. And, it was a loud school. Supposedly, that is similar to the government schools because both institutions use repetition via incessant chanting of memorized text. Click HERE for a class of younger students incessantly repeating the letters the nun points to on the chalkboard.

The older students would sit around class, chatting with each other and sometimes practicing their memorized chant. The only impetus to studying was if your turn to chant for the teacher came up. They you’d practice in a hurry. Click HERE for some young monks avidly reciting their chants all in their row, looking like they were worried what might happen if they got it wrong. I wondered about the consequences too. Note that their chants were not necessarily of religious text. Often they were of English, reading, or even math.

The youngest among them were going through the motions of taking a nap, supervised by a very bored monk. The early elementary school students were given the toughest nun, even draped in pink with her shaved head. This nun teacher in her 20’s did not mess around. There was discipline in her class, loudly wacked onto the tables of distracted students by a long cane that supposedly was intended as a pointer for the chalkboard. She would use it to wack the table, or really close to the offending children’s bodies, to start the chanting of one subgroup who would yell out their chants then she’d wack the table of another subgroup, always keeping them on their toes over whose turn was next. In the front of the room stood the greatest offending nun girl students who had perhaps been disruptive or not paying attention, and they had to stand with their arms high over their heads, fingers clasped at the top. Even that stance wasn’t strictly enforced, with the girls breaking down in giggles, dropping their arms to their sides often. That’s behavior management in the classroom, Buddhist Nun-style.

Click HERE FOR VIDEO titled: Burmese Buddhist Nun at the Buddhist Free Schools -- Wielding her cane to inspire chant-based learning and corporal punishment via standing with your hands over your head for a video of the nun teaching her class, wielding her cane like a harsh conductor of a symphony.

I think this Buddhist nun saw it as her job to break the kids in, literally, to the rigid, chanting system of learning in Burma. The government schools also are said to start harshly socializing the youngest children to a strictly obedient way of learning that requires you to memorize then be checked by the teacher, in small groups. Not only is harsh corporal punishment used in the early years, or so I’ve been told, by the teachers, but the harsh punishment may be part of a larger system to squelch “free thinking” or critical opinions being expressed. So, the government, the teachers, and the parents all silence the free speech by “wiping it out.” Maybe the harsh punishment is used for simple disruptive acting out, or is it used for dissent in class? Or for “unrest” in response to the harshly controlled chanting learning style?

Outside of this 10,000 Buddhist student hill was a huge propaganda sign placed by the government. I think it was placed there because these 10,000 Buddhist students were also a part of the 2007 Buddhist monk uprising. In fact, after their protests were squelched by the military, the military made most of them return to their rural villages, so there weren’t so many potential dissidents causing an uprising in the same location, all together. In the end, the Buddhist students only left for a few months, and they return to study again, all 10,000 together. Click HERE for a video of the monks lining up for lunch, the monks' last meal of the day, at the monk dormitory, with the young monks-in-training chanting a prayer before lunch. These meals are precious to the monks and their parents who can't afford to pay for their children's meals at home.

Now the monks, who were formerly protesters, study under the big propaganda sign that the government placed in front of their schools and in town, that said this:

“The people desire: Oppose those who do not support stability.” I’ll have to put a word into the military about my desire that they avoid double negatives in their propaganda. And, this desperate effort by the military to oppose critical questions and disruptive behavior in “the people” trickles down to the management of child behavior in the classroom and home.