Tanzania Educational Background
Education is compulsory in Tanzania for only 7 years, or until the student reaches the age of 15. As in Kenya, primary school fees were abolished in the last decade, but parents are still responsible for paying all the other costs of attending school, including uniforms, materials, and general school supplies, which is a large burden for many families in Tanzania (the country ranked 151st out of 180 countries in the UN Development Index). Secondary schools are not subsidized by the government, and students must pay to attend them. Interestingly enough, all instruction at the secondary level must be done in English. I found this fact interesting because in daily interactions with the Tanzanian people, both in the urban areas of Arusha and Dar Es Salaam, as well as the rural areas that I visited, the overall English proficiency was much lower than that seen in Kenya. Surrounded by a group of high school students in Singida, I was surprised to find only one to be even basically communicative in English. Seeing that all secondary level education must be conducted in English, this was startling, to say the least. The overall pace of life in Tanzania is much slower than that in Kenya, and there is much less transparency on the governmental level, despite less gross mismanagement of public funds by officials; this slower pace is also witnessed in the slower pace of educational reform and overall educational progress in the country, despite decades of governmental socialist leanings.
