No Liberian Child Should Learn On The Floor

A school in plain sight

THE CHILDREN OF Chief Compound Public School in Gbarnga are not asking for much. They want chairs.

THIS WEEK, FRONTPAGEAFRICA reported that more than 1,500 pupils at the school compete each morning for a handful of usable seats. Those who lose the race sit on bare concrete for hours, balancing exercise books on their knees. Others share broken benches or carry chairs from home. In the staff room, a teacher hunted for somewhere to put down her lesson notes before marking pupils’ books in the doorway, because that was where the light was.

THIS IS NOT a school lost in the bush, beyond a river that floods every rainy season. It sits in the capital of Bong County, a short walk from government offices. If children can be left on the floor here, in plain sight, we should be deeply worried about what is happening in schools that no reporter visits.

Why Monrovia must act

THE COUNTY EDUCATION Officer, David Boakai, told this newspaper he had not been aware of the conditions. We credit him for saying so plainly. But his answer is itself the indictment. A school of more than a thousand children in the county seat should not be invisible to the officer responsible for it. When it is, the failure is not one man’s. It belongs to a system that does not count, does not inspect and does not report.

THAT IS WHY this is a matter for the national government, not for Bong County alone. The Ministry of Education sets policy, controls the budget and decides what reaches the counties. Liberian law promises free and compulsory primary education. A promise of free schooling means little when a child must bring her own chair, or stay home because her parents cannot afford one. Pupils at Chief Compound told our reporter that some of their friends have stopped coming for exactly that reason.

A CHAIR IS not a luxury. It is the most basic tool of learning, after the teacher. A child who sits on the floor for six hours cannot write properly, cannot concentrate and learns, quietly, that the state did not expect her to arrive.

What the government must do

WE CALL ON the Ministry of Education and the national government to act on five fronts.

1. Furnish Chief Compound now. Deliver enough chairs and desks for every pupil and teacher before the end of this term. This is an emergency purchase, not a budget debate.

2. Count every seat in the country. Order a national audit of furniture in public schools: pupils enrolled, usable seats, and what must be repaired or replaced. Publish the results county by county.

3. Put furniture in the budget. Create a dedicated line for school furniture in the next national budget, tied to the audit’s figures, so that a chair does not depend on a donor’s goodwill or a parent’s pocket.

4. Stop charging children for chairs. Make clear that no public school may require pupils to bring their own seats as a condition of attending class.

5. Make officials see. Require county and district education officers to inspect and report on school conditions every term, and hold them answerable when a school like Chief Compound goes unreported.

6. ⁠

The measure of a government

GOVERNMENTS SPEAK OFTEN about education as the foundation of Liberia’s future. The children of Chief Compound are testing whether those words mean anything. They have done their part. They turned up, sat on the floor and still opened their exercise books.

“WE ARE CHILDREN, and all we are asking for is a chair,” one of them told our reporter. “We want to believe that somebody will hear us.”

THIS NEWSPAPER HAS heard them. The question now is whether the Ministry of Education and the national government will. We will return to Gbarnga to find out, and we will report what we see.

NO LIBERIAN CHILD should be forced to learn on the floor. Not in Gbarnga, and not anywhere else in this country.