By Emily Morris

Educators, policymakers, researchers, and the media alike use “dropout” to describe a young person who leaves school before completing their requisite grade or education level. This categorization assumes youth leave on their own volition when this research shows that most young people are pushed out of school. Through narratives and theater performances, Zanzibari youth resist the stigmatizing label and its enduring effects.

In kiSwahili, “dropout” is translated as “mtoro” and literally means a runaway or truant. In Zanzibar, a semi-autonomous archipelago in the United Republic of Tanzania, mtoro is an all-encompassing term for a young person who does not complete ten years of basic schooling (through Form 4). According to Zanzibar’s education policy and international development reports, youth “drop out” of school because of a deficit of motivation, skills, family support, and financial resources. For girls, early marriage and pregnancy are assumed factors (see World Bank and UNICEF). My youth-centered research challenges this deficit approach and asserts that young people rarely leave by choice. Zanzibari youth are pushed out for a myriad of reasons, including failing the high-stakes exam, needing to earn money for their families, falling ill, caring for an ailing relative, or not receiving needed educational supports. Moreover, a very small proportion of girls in this study are pushed out after they get pregnant.

Drawing on critical race and critical feminist scholarship from the Global North, and postcolonial and decolonizing education scholars from the Global South, I argue that we need to replace the term “dropout” with “pushout.” Simultaneously, I propose that we must stop pathologizing youth by assuming they are falling short, and instead recognize how education systems rarely provide environments and supports that enable marginalized youth to thrive and succeed.

When I started this research thirteen years ago, I used the term “dropout” without question. It is a label commonly used by ministries and departments of education around the world, and a statistic regularly reported by UNESCO, academia, and beyond. However, as education scholar Monique Morris (2016) argues in her work Pushout: Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, this normalized term not only stigmatizes but also actively pushes young people into situations of further marginalization. This label likewise shifts the responsibility from an education system laden with historical class and gender biases onto youth themselves. When we as educators, researchers, policymakers, and advocates embrace this term, we reproduce harmful assumptions and fail to interrogate the systemic factors that push young people out of school.

As an educator-researcher-activist committed to longitudinal research, I have worked closely for the past two decades investigating young people’s educational pathways in Zanzibar. With my colleagues from Zanzibar’s Ministry of Education and Vocational Training, Abrahman Faki Othman and Ahmad (Bello) Ali Mohamed, I have followed a group of 1,100 students from preschool in 2007 through the end of their secondary schooling. In 2016, we began participatory and youth-centered research with 41 rural, urban, and semi-urban youth at the time they took their high-stakes exams, which determined whether they could continue to upper secondary school. During two ten-day workshops which utilized a popular theater approach, 41 young people (19 rural and 22 urban and semi-urban) collectively authored and staged vignettes on the pains, hurdles, and triumphs they encountered in pursuit of a secondary school certificate. In a performance for their peers, they enacted the gendered forces that push or pull youth out of school, as well as the ways in which they resisted being labeled a mtoro. Over the course of six months, youth collaborators wrote individual narratives about their school experiences and journaled about their visions for the future.

Among the 19 rural youth who told and performed narratives about their schooling, six were pushed out of school before obtaining a secondary school certificate. Three young women, Jokha, Halima, and Pili (all pseudonyms), were pushed out after failing the exams. As detailed in her journal, Jokha lost her own mother as a child and was the main caregiver for an infant niece. Jokha was also a first-generation secondary school student and described being routinely stigmatized because her mother had never been to school. She wrote, “Others say, ‘your mother never went to school and even if you pass, you will never continue on, you will marry whether you like it or not.’” Even though Jokha studied four hours a day while in school and tried her best to attend free after-school tutoring sessions, it was still not enough to master the exam in English, her second language. After being pushed out of school, she learned to sew from neighbors and tried to earn money through tailoring gigs to help her family survive. Two years after the exam, Jokha described how her aspiration to become a teacher was crushed after being pushed out.

On the first day of our theater workshop, Khamis described to Abrahman, Bello, and I that, “my brain doesn’t work well.” What he meant was that he could not compose a complete, written sentence in his native language of kiSwahili. With no learning specialist in his community to consult, Khamis endured eight years of schooling by memorizing notes his classmates read to him orally and copying sentences from the board. He was told repeatedly that his “head was thick” and that he should just try harder. Khamis wrote in his journal about the many setbacks in his schooling, including long bouts of illnesses where he missed months of school and skipped class to search for food. “On the days that my parents don’t have money, I go to the bush to forage coconuts and then I sell them to get food,” he recounted.

Khamis also wrote about wanting to be a pilot. He co-authored and performed a scene where a female neighbor degraded him for going to secondary school, claiming that it was a place for women only. “She often tells me that there is no reason for me to go to school… she urges me to go fish, to go to the beach and earn money.” When Khamis eventually failed the exam and was pushed out, he described feeling embarrassed and ashamed. Four years later he is working gig jobs as a mechanic but the label mtoro has remained. Without a secondary school certificate, he had to reimagine his future from becoming formally employed as a pilot to picking up gig labor.

Labeling young people as dropouts reinforces a pathologizing narrative that they are failing, when we as educators, policymakers, and researchers are failing them. The youth in this study implicitly and explicitly challenged and resisted being classified as a “dropout” and performed how this label harms them. Their performances demonstrate that grouping young women and men into a single statistic reveals little about why they have been pushed out and further marginalizes them. If we want youth to succeed, then we need to rid the educational vocabulary of “dropout” and redress the forces that push and pull young people out of school. This includes removing high stakes testing barriers, creating more accessible and relevant guidance and counseling programs, and establishing financial safety nets that young people and their families can access in times of hardship. If we are committed to becoming conscientious educators and advocates, then we must shift our energies from labeling young people to working together to change systems so that they can thrive.

About the author

Emily (Markovich) Morris is a scholar, educator, and research practitioner of comparative education and international development. Her research explores questions of social justice and equity in formal and nonformal education. She is currently a Senior Professorial Lecturer at American University and Director of International Training and Education Program, and serves on several global, inclusive education tasks forces.