Liberia faces a serious dilemma, not knowing what to do with her broken educational system. The much-heralded postwar leadership of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has dismally failed to provide basic education for our children. Our educational infrastructure remains in tatters while her family and cronies enrich themselves amidst rampant official corruption. According to UNESCO sources, 65% of our children of official elementary school ages are not in school.
No wonder, Sirleaf herself has called the school system a mess as though she is the opposition politician she was before stealing the presidency, thanks to her “international partners”. Our children can’t count, spell and read anymore. Our high school kids can’t pass the regional school-leaving examinations. They can’t pass admission exams to higher institutions of learning. A staggering 25,000 students failed the University of Liberia placement examinations.
The university itself, a mere textbook-teaching body, has degenerated into a pathetic super high school, thereby diminishing its primary role as a research center. It lacks scholars, qualified instructors and resources.
Folks, we didn’t just wake up one morning and discovered that we had a problem with our public school system. In fact, the writings were already on the wall. Under the nose of President Sirleaf, official corruption has been more rampant than ever in the history of this country. And corruption is a major underlying factor of the current public school crisis.
After a 14-year long destruction of our scarce infrastructure masterminded by this insensitive old woman, there has always been a dire need for a comprehensive national reconstruction—the need to rebuild our healthcare delivery system, law enforcement system—not to mention the broken public school system.
It is a shame that, after eleven long years of the Sirleaf administration, our public school system remains deplorable: overcrowded class rooms for teachers who make minimum wages; students have no textbooks and in most cases carry their own chairs to school, and have to share them with needy classmates.
No, folks! The problem is not that we have not had the money for postwar reconstruction. The United Nations says it has spent more than 17 billion dollars for Liberia’s postwar reconstruction. Besides, the Sirleaf administration has received millions of donors’ money that could have been used to re-build our broken institutions, including the educational system.
Unfortunately, Sirleaf and her cronies have practically lined their pockets. Sirleaf as an individual lacks the political will to fund the public school system. Our children’s education is not her priority because her grandchildren live and go to school abroad. She wants our children to remain illiterate and ignorant. And she does not care!
Yet, in her pretense to fix the public school system Sirleaf has appointed a gravy-seeking yanka boy from the backwoods of southeastern Liberia to head the education ministry.
Clearly ill-educated and incompetent, the reformist Minister of Education thinks we should abandon fixing the broken school system ourselves and outsource it to foreigners, because in his warped thinking the foreigners are smarter—they understand our objective conditions better. Hence, we should adopt their magical programs for the education of our own children.
Shame on this guy for dashing his civic responsibilities to other people while receiving a fat salary for a job he is unable to perform. He is effectively delivering our children to be experimented on. Not long ago, the western pharmaceutical companies allegedly used West Africans as guinea pigs by transplanting the Ebola virus in the Mano River basin to produce a vaccine. That heartless experiment snubbed lives from thousands of our people. Why should Liberians continue to be guinea pigs for foreigners?
Was this a part of Ellen Sirleaf’s educational platform to transfer the young brains of our country to foreign laboratories? We already have the problem of brain drain spurred by the civil war. Hundreds of thousands of educated Liberians live at the peripheries of western societies, menial jobs in exile. What was the real purpose of the Liberian civil war, anyway–to auction our natural resources, steal our money, and sell our children’s brains to foreigners to be experimented on?
I have to concede, though, that our public school system was never the best in West Africa prior to our civil crisis. There were always problems, but past leaders had the political will to make the system better. For example, President William Tubman, set the pace for a nationwide public education system.
With the massive help of the American Peace Corps volunteers and Christian missionaries, the Tubman administration delivered a vibrant learning system except that the system produced alienated educated Liberians like Ellen Sirleaf who, practically knowing nothing about themselves and their own country, have become aping men and women. Because of their identity crisis underpinned by their alien education, the likes of Sirleaf are comfortable with being plantation workers—essentially puppets for the west.
President William R. Tolbert could have made a difference in the public school system had he not been cut down by the power that be. He vigorously set out to reform the system, sensing something was inherently wrong with it.
For example, in the 1970s he soon noticed that Liberian high school graduates could barely pass the placement examination of the medical school at the University of Liberia. He reportedly had to ask the university authorities to make the admission examinations easy in order to increase the enrollment of Liberian students into the medical school.
The medical school was then one of the best in Africa. Folks came from all over the continent to study medicine in Liberia. There were rarely Liberian medical doctors in those days, and Liberian students could not cope with the academic rigors of a trailblazer, prestigious medical school in their own country.
President Tolbert earnestly sought to raise standards in the public school system in par with those of neighboring West African countries. He signed up Liberia for what is now the West African Examination. During his administration, the Monrovia Consolidated School System (MCSS) was established and ran well.
Tolbert also conceived and introduced multilateral education which was realized in the construction and setting up of multilateral schools in Lofa and Grand Gedeh Counties. Tolbert was unfortunately assassinated before Liberians could be adequately prepared to pass the regional examination.
But, under the military dictatorship standards in the public school system dropped miserably. The military leaders themselves were a bunch of school dropouts– barely literate. They were cynical about education, if not anti-intellectual.
Yet under the Doe dictatorship, graduate programs were added to the University of Liberia. For example, The Babangida School of International Relations at the University of Liberia can be credited to the Doe Administration. All the same, the public school system was still ridden with problems.
The situation was compounded by the civil turmoil during which Liberian children had to learn in makeshift schools on refugee camps around the world. Taylor’s gangsterism and don’t-care attitude to education did not help the matters. By the time the peace accord was signed, Liberia had mass illiterate or ill-educated young people some of whom, as adults, are now wearing fake academic degrees on their sleeves to become ministers in the current administration.
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was supposed to arrest the deplorable situation because she was the Harvard-educated economist, the World Bank functionary, and a veteran Liberian activist who had special sensitivity to Liberia’s woes. Ironically, under her administration the nation is thrown back to the middle ages.
Our public school system has especially crumbled, and she has no clues what to do to fix it. Not knowing what to do, she has surrendered the running of the country to foreigners. Like her generation, our children must now be educated by foreigners who know nothing about our customs, values, mores, social relations; the sum total of our culture—thereby alienating them in their cultural environment.
What kind of drug is Sirleaf or her butterfly, Minister of Education taking? Is this what President Sirleaf has been calling educational reforms? And then she threatens to shut down any public school who expresses dissatisfaction with this political yanka boy of an Education Minister with his ridiculous plan.
She even slams the aggrieved teachers with her stance. And that, whether we like it or not, her minister’s plan will go on as scheduled. It’s like the old monkey dance in Liberia that says, “You like it, JACKO, and if you don’t like it JACKO LANTERN”.
We all know that the public system is a mess and that Sirleaf can’t fix it. Her careless attitude towards the teachers in the public school system speaks volumes as it is a slap in the face. Yet her cronies like George Werner receive monthly salaries ranging from US$8,000 to US$25,000 with huge incentives and benefits. But teachers should get paid US$100 a month to teach an overcrowded class room with no teaching materials. What an insensitive, delusional old woman!
Candidly speaking, the plan suggested by the Education Minister also speaks volumes. It tells me that this man is hallucinating. He lacks foresight, let alone solutions to the public school crisis.
You have a child who’s having some problems in school; facing difficulty reading and writing or has problem understanding language arts, arithmetic, and so forth.
Furthermore, you’re aware that your child doesn’t even have appropriate textbooks neither does the school teacher.
And what’s even worst, the teacher doesn’t possess the required teaching materials or instructional textbooks for that class. The child has to carry a chair to school which he or she might have to share with a classmate in an overcrowded class. This is not a fiction, but a reality in public schools around Liberia in the 21st century.
Now, after seeing this pathetic picture of the life of an average public school student in Liberia, I will like to ask the Minister of Education these questions: What’s your final solution to fixing Liberia’s educational problems? Do you still think that the best thing to do is to outsource our elementary education?
The solution is not to outsource the education of Liberian children or the entire elementary educational system. First of all, meet the needs of the teachers— better salaries, even if you have to take a pay cut. Recommend to your boss, the old lady to take a pay cut too. Then tell her to slice and dice her foreign trips, as well as her ministers’ salaries, and the budget of the Legislature.
Also give the teachers the appropriate instructional textbooks, teaching materials, logistics, and all the needed help to prepare the nation’s youth for a brighter future. Make the necessary textbooks available and affordable; train and hire more teachers.
Reduce the number of students in a class so that our teachers can be more efficient and better able to assist the students. And if for some reason that students continue to face problems with a particular subject, then seeking outside help for that subject will be in the right direction, and not the entire curriculum. Got the picture?
It’s also a good thing to look at the progress of other African nations and copy some of their styles or how their programs work. But we need to understand that early learning or primary education is fundamental to the success of our youth.
It is important because it sets the foundation that is desperately needed to build a brighter future for our country. And Liberia needs to begin building educational foundations throughout the country.
So, it is important that we select competent people with backgrounds in education to head the Ministry of Education. This is a very important ministry with huge responsibilities.
The pronouncement by the Minister of Education to outsource elementary education is not just irresponsible; it is detrimental to the young minds of Liberia as well as our posterity.
Instead of the President asking China to spend $60,000.000 to build the ministerial complex to window-dress Monrovia, how’s about redirecting that project and build more schools, libraries, learning centers, and provide the necessary teaching materials to assist the teachers nationwide—After you have persistently said that the our educational system is a mess?
And how about bringing experienced Liberian teachers from abroad to help reduce the overcrowded class rooms so that our teachers can be more efficient? Madame Author of “This Child Will Be Great”, the future of the nation will be great if we invest in our young Liberians. Don’t you think so?
D. Garkpe Gedepoh, Contributing Writer