I don’t think I would have called them what he did. But he did.

Photo by Safari Consoler

“They are a cage.”

My longtime friend didn’t pull any punches when we recently caught up on the realities of our schools in Uganda, especially primary and kindergarten.

He’s been working to promote discipleship, especially among primary Christian school teachers, and the problems he has encountered are commonplace, yet remain burdensome to hear.

One, we talked about how play-centered learning is almost nonexistent; kids as young as 5 years in Uganda today are not only bundled up in school vans by 6 am but also deprived of a critical part of their brain development, sleep.

They are then held in “caged” classes up to 4pm (some later than that), often because there is a well-meaning busy parent somewhere who has to clock in and out of a full-time job.

And I am in it enough to empathize with the survival/hustle mindset, but maybe our Christian communities should offer better parenting models beyond “Don’t I already put clothes on your back, food on the table, and take you to a good school?”

So what happens? My friend shared how teachers literally lock the child up all day in a cute wallpapered cell, disguised with some blackboards and teaching aids. (Our last school experiment with our four-year-old at a nearby kindergarten reminded me of this experience.)

And while that is happening, he said, teachers are more concerned that the “child clothes are found clean when the parent arrives”—not bothered by the God-wrought science of a child’s brain development through more play. But they are more fascinated with competence than character, whether a child can “read and write as soon as possible,” they say.

Today, even boarding schools welcome toddlers who will spend miles away in concentrated environments, awaiting visitation day from the strangers they still call “Mum and Dad.”

Whether it’s Deuteronomy 6 or Proverbs 1, God’s designs throughout human civilization have always put child care and development under the underestimated oversight of two parents.

This is not to mean we all homeschool or pull our kids out of pricey daycare centers (or maybe we just should), but it means more Ugandan Christians need to get involved and pay attention to the commerce and ignorance currently driving how our toddlers learn and develop.

We also talked about how even Christian schools almost never ” spiritually vet” who comes in as a “Christian” teacher, apart from the testimony the candidate gives “about themselves.” Yet personal values are often “caught” by those they will teach, sometimes faster than the information they dispense.

Christian education calls for at least a basic grasp of Christian doctrine. For many Christian schools, this is easily assumed, and the implication is that you have more role players than character models in Christian schools.

Speaking of the commerce driving our education “industry” (yes), I hesitate to cite my example, but my first fees at university back in 2011 were a quarter of what most of us pay to kindergartens today. Well, let me not chase that rabbit hole now.

Oh, by the way, we didn’t finish our conversation with the educator gentleman (I hope we soon do), yet one thing became clear for me: Christian parents know it historically too: education was never assigned to the secular man and his post-industrial innovations.

Learning (more so the kind that affirms the creating and redeeming activity of God) is a mandate of Dad and Mum, and when they decide to outsource it based on noble reasons like “survival/hustle or busyness,” they better do so, having discerned some of what is on offer in our Ugandan schools today.

This, by God’s grace, can change. Our Kampala Faith and Work movement is catalyzing (smaller) sector-specific prayer & action forums where believers can start counting on God to start institutions that will renew their setors for the glory of God. In the meantime, prayerfully consider joining our education action forum on WhatsApp.