One thing I’ve learned about the Senegalese school system is that: it varies depending on where you are. Institutionally, it has been designed to mirror the French school system and is to be organized and maintained in the same, westernized manner.
However, in conversations with my fellow Peace Corps program peers in other regions of the country, it seems that some of their schools are well-organized and easy to approach, while others are barely operational.
As Senegal has many different people groups and topographies with different farming seasons and cultures, I imagine there are as many education experiences as there are communities. For this reason, I’ll be talking about the schools in my part of Senegal and not necessarily schools in Senegal overall.
Your journey…
As a child in my rural farming town, you might begin kindergarten at age three or four and attend that school for two or three years. Technically, the only subject taught is the French language, though this encompasses learning about numbers, colors, shapes and body parts, as your vocabulary expands.
