Free The Beautiful Tree by James Tooley Page B

yes, their siblings went to private schools. And they gave me names, like KPS, St. Williams’ and Legacy, with which I’d become familiar. At this point, the headmistress admitted that she had never been into Makoko itself, had never seen where her children came from. When pressed, she said she didn’t know whether there were any private schools there, but she was pretty sure there were not, and that the children were playing wicked games with their foreign visitor.
    On the second floor of her school, two of the classrooms were empty; in the third were two middle-aged female teachers at their desks side by side near the door. They chatted with me pleasantly. Here, the third and fourth grades were housed together, with 60 children. Why were they in the same classroom? Because they didn’t have enough desks for two classes, so they sat them together. On the third floor, three classrooms were empty and in the fourth were three classes together; with 90 children registered, I was told, although only 75 were present. The three teachers again sat at their desks neatly arranged along the window side, doing nothing apparently, while the children sat doing nothing either. Again, the reason given was that they had no desks and benches for the children.
    I pointed out to the headmistress that in the six empty classrooms in the first primary school, just yards away from where we were standing, there were stacks of unused desks and benches. She said she didn’t know that. Why didn’t she have the desks brought over? “What goes on in the other government schools is not my business,” she shrugged.

Coda
    Almost two years after my first visit to Makoko, I arrived at the plush Secretariat buildings in Lagos, seeking an interview with the commissioner of education about the role of private schools in reaching “education for all.” I’d got my research results in the interim, and they were quite astonishing: we’d found 32 private schools in the shantytown of Makoko, none recognized by the government, and estimated that around 70 percent of schoolchildren in Makoko went to private school. In the poor areas of Lagos State more generally, we’d estimated that 75 percent of all schoolchildren were in private schools, of which only some were registered with the government. In fact, more students were attending unregistered private schools alone than were enrolled in the government sector. Based on these findings, and after showing him photographs and video footage of BSE and his school, I’d convinced television producer Dick Bower that the work was of interest, and he’d received commissions from BBC World and BBC 2’s flagship news program Newsnight to make documentaries in Makoko, illustrating the general themes that were emerging.
    It was fascinating to watch Dick’s position change during the course of his two weeks in Makoko. Before arriving there, he’d been convinced that this would be a soft-focus story of one or two committed people establishing schools against the odds, focusing on a couple of cute children—like Sandra who had first led me to Ken Ade Private School—and telling their story. I don’t think Dick had really believed that so many private schools existed, nor that those who had set them up could be described as entrepreneurs rather than social workers. But then as we’d wandered around Makoko and bumped into one private school after another, I could see that Dick realized there was more to this story than he had first thought. But the real eye opener for him came when we interviewed the commissioner of education for Lagos State and, with his permission, filmed in the government schools too. Far from being a soft-focus film about the delightful antics of a few poor people, he realized that he was onto a hard-hitting political story, about the denial among people with power that something remarkable was happening among the poor. I’ll return later to some of what he heard when we interviewed the people