Awra Amba RJ 300612 EN - Contacter un comité local d'Attac

5. Education
Picture 17: Gathering of children under the authority of an adult in the village centre before going
to school, in April 2010.
In addition the children from Awra Amba study, in 2010, in the state school four hours a morning on
Saturday and Sunday for lesson review and exercises. For that the teachers are directly paid by the
community (400 birrs a month, i.e. 22 Euros) (Jo10b/7).
School is free, but materials, notebooks and books will be charged for and are bought by the
community (Crespo, 2011). The Awra Amba community has better relations with the school than
other communities: some of its members have been invited by the school to give a speech on ethics
and other aspects of their experience, but it is not the case of other communities (Yi07/88).
The village students are very active in social and ethical clubs of the school, and very comfortable
with the group discussions. They are hard working, preferring to study, or to play and to discuss
between them than to play with others. They consider themselves as members of a same family and
avoid criticizing their community in front of the others. They are not very open to students from
other villages, which for that matter do not appreciate them and avoid mixing with them, especially
during the two first years, because of their assumed lack of religion. However, the relations improve
over time (Yi07/72-79 & 87).
The teachers appreciate the Awra Amba students, finding them more hardworking, more ethical and
more cooperative than others; they cite them often as an example (Yi07/74-75 et 86). According to
these teachers, they are better than others in first and second grade, because they benefited by
kindergarten, but afterwards they are at the same level (Yi07/72). On the contrary, the head master
had assured us that the students from Awra Amba succeed more than others (Jo10b/7) (Question 37
in Annex).
Yirga (2007/93) is worried the Awra Amba community to be sometimes given as an example over
the curriculum, introducing so a discrimination between children from the various communities. It is
apparently also an issue among teachers. But isn't normal to take as example the social advances,
since they are really social advances? Yirga's criticism can be understood implicitly as a
disagreement with some values of the community – especially the lack of religion, rather than an
educational disagreement.
5.3. Educational level
We have the results of two surveys on the educational level of Awra Amba members, presented
Figure 13. The first survey has been conducted among the whole population of the village in 2005
(At05/63), but it does not allow differentiating adults and children: however, 45 % of the population
are aged under 15 (49 % of men and 41 % of women), and 58 % are aged under 20. 52 % of the
population are unable to read and write. Among people able at least to read and write, men are
67 / 85