If It Streams, Let It Flow Into NUS

Written by Pio Sioa
Friday, 01 February 2008
In between ducking the rain, sloshing through flooding waters, and the jarring of body parts by unsuspecting potholes digging up our roads by the minute, the past few days have not been exactly a walk in beautiful, sun drenched paradise. Too squishy for the feet’s liking that is for sure. Water puddles and mud squeezing between the toes makes walking to work or to buy something from the nearby shop, a messy and dirty affair. Of course we can always point an accusing finger at someone or something, other than ourselves to take the blame – it is human nature. So if we are looking for consolation, let us be human in this case and shaft our road workers for the pot holes and sore bodies. As for what brought about the rain and the flooding, well that is shifting the blame to a higher and more complicated level. Let us not go there. As predicted by our MET. crew at Mulinu’u the sun did shine yesterday. There you go, a change worth feeling cheerful about. So it has not all been bad. The brightest spot of all, since the doldrums of cyclone weather settled in, can be found at the Lepapaigalagala Campus of our National University of Samoa. Streams of bright young teenage faces have been flowing into the campus to enrol for higher education since the start of the week. What a sight to warm the heart. The imagination roams into the future of Samoa and the promises of what a properly educated population holds. Who knows, maybe one of the kids who enrolled this week is destined to spark a brain flash that will fix our flooding misery. The real story to lift the sodden heart about the kids entering the NUS this year, are the exceptional ones. The intake every year are traditionally from the long established schools like, Samoa College and all the main church schools, Catholic, Congregation, Methodist, Mormon and so forth. In recent years, however, newer learning establishments outside of urban Apia have been set up. Names like Palalaua College at Siumu or Lepa College at Aleipata have been added to our educational recruitment map. The longterm goal as we have all been told is to encourage rural based families to keep their sons and daughters closer to home. The distractions of life in Apia and living with relatives away from the guiding influence of loving parents, diminishes the intensity of student resolve. The reasoning is easy enough to grasp with plenty of head nods all around to give support. There are shortcomings of course that have to be overcome, and they present themselves in varying degrees of difficulties. The construction of new school buildings and all the other infrastractual support services a new college may need are now readily available, so all that is no longer a major. Donor fundings are there for the asking as well! Again the development of rural education is fortunate in that respect. For the more difficult ones to crack , you can normally see it coming at you with breath taking terms like, capacity building or institutional programme strengthening. Officialdom loves to throw those mile long terms around. But it is quite scary though for ordinary folks like us from the rural outbacks to hear people talk like that. All we want to hear is whether our spanking new school buildings will be manned by quality teachers, or good administrators to run our schools properly. Will having our own village college guarantee that our children are receiving effective education in the classrooms? Are they learning enough to be competitive against town based children? Will they score high enough marks to be able to enrol at our National University of Samoa? These are the simple concerns we in the villages want to know, as parents. In general, the results so far have been mixed. There are still several village based colleges struggling with little success to raise the level of education for their students, to qualify for the NUS. There are also newer schools, coming up with some very surprising and indeed inspiring results. A quick browse of the eligibility roll the enrolment officials at the NUS are currently working off this week, shows Lepa College at Aleipata with 4 students who have qualified for the Foundation programme. Another 6 more are qualified for other programmes in education and nursing. A truly promising start. But while this is inspirational and warming to the heart, why are other longer established schools like Tuasivi College, Aana College or even Amoa College still lacking behind? Hopefully the explanation does not transform itself into the length of a marathon race, lined with 2 mile long phrases, to puff the stuff out of us simple folks. All we want are longer streams of students rolling into our prized campus at Le Papaigalagala, with increasing input from the village colleges. Comments (0) Subscribe to this comment's feed Write comment Name Email Title Comment
Last Updated ( Saturday, 02 February 2008 )

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