Visit of Glenn Jones, NPH International Education Specialist Mai 3, 2012 - Peru
"Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave." (Henry Peter Broughan)
Glenn and our girls
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We were very pleased about the visit of Glenn Jones a new Associate Director of the Family Service Team and an expert in the educational field. Focusing on ensuring the quality of our educational programs, Glenn´s purpose was to analyze the situation of the educational opportunities of our children and to see in which areas he can help us to improve. This was a difficult task, as our home does not have its own school. All our children are visiting a public local school which fortunately was very keen to talk and collaborate with us.
Also the meeting with the caregivers of our primary grade students brought interesting results; all our caregivers agreed on the fact that it was very important to strengthen the focus on reading. Many of our children have problems in this area as they did not attend school on a regular basis before entering NPH. That´s why they need special dedication to catch up on what they have missed while not attending school. An idea is to implement training programs for the caregivers and the teachers from the local school on how to teach reading.
“The secret is to change the attitude of the teachers who often do not realize that they also need to study. Some teachers never study again once they have their degree. Another problem is that teachers in Latin America are perceived as always being correct and there is not enough space for the children to ask or doubt in what their teachers are saying”, states Glenn, who himself has been a teacher for 41 years. As education is one of our most important concerns, given that it allows you to lead a self-dependent life and it is the way out of poverty, the great goal is to create the best possible opportunities for our pequeños. This goal can be reached through trainings and workshops for the NPH teachers and also local ones. In so doing we will improve the education at our nine NPH homes and in a long-term perspective also in the respective countries.
