By Isaac Massaquoi
Maybe we should commission a national survey to determine which profession or professions the people of Sierra Leone trust and respect the most and which ones the least. The 2018 result of this study done by one of the most trusted polling organizations in the UK, Ipsos MORI ranks Nurses, Doctors, Teachers, Engineers and Professors as the most trusted. At the bottom of the trust log are Estate Agents, Journalists, Government Ministers and Politicians generally. In the current atmosphere in Sierra Leone, a survey like that would, I believe, put teachers at the very bottom of the log.
Accused of engaging in examination fraud by organizing special examination rooms for school pupils who can afford to part with reasonably substantial amounts of money, of tampering with exam grades under the influence of money or sex, paraded near the historic Cotton Tree in an elaborate and painful naming-and-shaming exercise for rigging exams, things are definitely not looking good for our teachers these days.
So it was a good idea to make the question of the current difficult state of education in Sierra Leone with particular reference to the role of teachers a topic for the latest edition of the SIERRAEYE Debate. The motion on the night was: “Teachers Are Not Responsible for the Educational Crisis in Sierra Leone”. Against the background of a very poisoned national atmosphere, those who argued for the motion had their work cut out from the outset. To be honest I gave them no chance against those who spoke for the motion. In fact the audience was largely against them, perhaps until the end of the first round.
Here’s what I was able to pick out as the main points from both sides.
FOR THE MOTION
Dr Julius Spencer and his colleagues were very clear that teachers bore the greatest responsibility for all the problems in the education sector and their definition of a teacher covered those in the classroom and those who now administer education from the ministry but had taught before that. They argued that teachers had opened themselves up to bribery and other forms of corruption leading to the precipitous fall in the standard of education in Sierra Leone. The result is that in our classrooms the children are not taught how to compete fairly and win in life, be it in exams or for jobs when they graduate. They grow up seeing nothing wrong in using short cuts to achieve their objective and that when the same people begin to run the country, they rig elections, steal from the national purse and take bribes to subvert due processes in all areas of national life.
AGAINST THE MOTION
They were keen to make the point that what society had done was basically to make a scapegoat of teachers for the systemic failures of all facets of society leading to the virtual collapse of education, and that there were many schools in operation today, the proprietors of which actually had to cut corners to get them established and the school accreditation process had been corrupted so much that schools come on stream without meeting the necessary requirements. They even wondered why parents were not protesting to force the political authorities to do something about failed and failing schools.
For me a really strong argument I noted from this side of the debate came from Yeaniva Sesay who argued that the continuous vilification of teachers by society had created a situation in which no good and self-respecting person wanted to be a teacher and that the few who went into the profession did so only as a stopgap measure while they searched for jobs elsewhere. The few who remained and had caused the collapse in standards were actually “miscreants” not teachers, they argued.
LOOKING FOR A SOLUTION
There was nothing radical about the solutions proposed at the end of the debate. We have all heard about reviewing the curriculum and teaching methods before, we have heard the need to close down schools that have failed. We have also heard about drastically improving the salaries and conditions of service for teachers and indeed waking up parents to their responsibility to play their part in the educational development of their children. There was really nothing new. So why are we still dealing with such matters as the nation slides down the African education ladder.
I will only throw in a word on just one aspect of the solutions mentioned above.
THE FAMILY
One of the rituals I help perform every year is to interview applicants to the various departments in the Faculty of Arts at Fourah Bay College. It's a really interesting exercise because we get to meet 17/18-year-olds from different social backgrounds with all kinds of aspirations ranging from wanting to become the President of Sierra Leone to serving at the United Nations, becoming CEOs of major corporations and returning to their rural communities to organize people and help change their lives.
Something has stuck with me over the last five years or so. This is not scientific but over 70% of the children when asked a specific question about just who will pay their fees and provide basic maintenance for them throughout their course have named their mothers, half of whom are either civil servants or petty traders. When we’ve probed further to locate their fathers, the reply has always been that daddy is missing in action. This is a very serious issue.
So when the debaters talked about the responsibilities of parents towards their children’s educational pursuits, I put this forward as a practical demonstration of the situation we find ourselves in today in this country. There is a lot of pressure on families to make ends meet and the fathers in particular – our traditional breadwinners – are running away from their responsibilities.
MY TAKE
In general I agreed with those against the motion because I believe that we are living in a society where in many of those sectors where high integrity is required the love for money is taking over. So you go to a bank and withdraw money. They give it to you bound and wrapped in plastic. You open it and to your surprise in each bundle two or three bills are missing. By the time you count 10 to 20 bundles you discover that you have lost good money. Nobody expects that from any bank; we have religious leaders who conduct fake weddings with their eyes wide open just to make it possible for people to obtain the necessary papers to travel abroad; people meet Justices of the Peace in street corners in central Freetown and for a small fee they swear to an oath to tamper with something as fundamental as their date of birth. The JP signs, collects his cash and issues the document pretending it is all well and good.
So it comes as no surprise to hear about Special Rooms in some schools or children going to the homes of subject teachers to retake core subjects at night using certified WASSCE examination booklets smuggled by exam supervisors. The point I am making is that things have gone so bad that it makes no sense to isolate and vilify just one group of people, in this case teachers. Marcella Samba Sesay made the point that the rot in all these sectors had entered our classrooms and the products of those classrooms were basically continuing the vicious cycle.
This debate was very well attended but once again despite the event being planned for live TV broadcast it ran well behind schedule, not because the organizers didn’t put everything in place but because the bulk of the invited guests arrived more than half an hour late. There may be more than a thousand reasons that people can advance including rounding up the usual suspects – transportation difficulties, evening rush hour traffic and not being able to leave the office before regulation time because the debate happened on a week day. All I can say is that the long term consequences of starting would be that many people who would otherwise have been part of the home audience may find it annoying, even impossible, to put up with waiting for a scheduled program that makes it a habit of going on air half an hour late.
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