13 – Education

This has been a very difficult post for me to write, and one that has been a long time coming. I feel like of what little I’ve written for this blog, so much of it has been negative, and that isn’t fair to my friends and neighbors here and to the country of Sierra Leone as a whole. I think when I’m able to get a little distance, it will be easier to look back more fondly and to not feel overwhelmed by the negatives, and I do intend to put some of that into words here as well. But right now I still feel like I’m in the thick of it.

In my post from several months ago, Old Ways and New Ways, I talked about various ways in which attempts at westernization in rural Sierra Leone seem to have failed. There was one big aspect of failed westernization that I didn’t ever talk about though, and that’s the education system. It feels too close to home and too emotionally charged for me to talk about my personal experiences with the failure of schools here, as opposed to being able to talk abstractly about government and churches and hospitals. It also undermines my whole reason for being here. My job, as a Peace Corps schoolteacher, is to attempt to do exactly what I was so critical of in that earlier blog post—to try to smooth over the forced westernization and modern-age colonization of West Africa, to improve conditions here only so long as I stick to the narrow western views of what that improvement should look like. It is hard for me to write this blog post knowing that I and the organization I work for are likely part of the problem, but I feel like I need to try.

 

Going to School in Sierra Leone

Whenever I spend time at my school I constantly fall into asking myself questions like “what is it all even for?” The education system here does not make sense to me. I’ve been here long enough now that I understand much more of the education system’s inner workings, the structure, possibly even how it came to be this way, but I still don’t understand the point. I realize I’m being really vague here still, so let me just dive in and try to describe what I’m talking about.

Children usually start attending school for the first time as primary or pre-primary students, at maybe around four to six years old. There is a lot of pressure from the government, from foreign NGOs, and from communities themselves to have children attend school, and so almost all of the primary-school-aged students in my town go to school. Having their children attend school is a source of pride to parents, seen as a worthy use for the money they scrape together for school fees and uniforms.

The first six years of school are meant to teach students basic math and English. Personally I think the real goal and the real accomplishment of schools at this level is to teach children how to be students: how to sit still all day, how to hold a pen and how to copy down notes written on a blackboard, how to repeat phrases as a class in unison so that they can be memorized, how to work together to share answers and cheat on tests so as not to be shamed by the teacher for being stupid, how to avoid being flogged with a cane as much as possible.

By the time students reach junior secondary school, around age eleven or so, the classroom culture is deeply ingrained. Any potential for free thought or critical thinking has been beaten out of them, often literally. I know Americans sometimes complain about our own education being too rigid and conformist but I promise it is worse here. And by junior secondary school, the culture of cheating is ingrained as well. Oftentimes it is encouraged by the teachers, seen as a preferable alternative to being incorrect or stupid. The teachers and students both have a vague sense that cheating is Wrong and Bad somehow, but this is a view being imposed on them from the outside; they themselves see nothing wrong with it. Cheating is just doing what it takes to get the answer right. Giving answers to another student is just helping out a friend. It sometimes seems beautiful to me, in its own way, during those rare moments when I can manage to drop my handicap of indoctrinated western values. When the students cheat, they help each other selflessly. They will help a stranger as readily as a friend. They would take a bullet before they would ever rat out a comrade. If I wasn’t stuck with my and my culture’s own preconceived notions about education, maybe I would be able to look at classrooms not as “English class” or “math class” but rather as places where children prepare for adulthood by learning trust, compassion for neighbors, and mutual aid.

But this blog post is about my experiences as a teacher, not an idealist, and every good teacher knows the harm that cheating can do. In Sierra Leone, cheating is such a foundational part of education that as long as somebody in the classroom is able to figure out the answer to a question, everyone in the class will manage to have that answer on their test paper. Thus, passing or failing has little to do with how much a student has learned (and if cheating on its own is not enough for a passing grade, teachers can usually also be bribed with money and/or sex). Students promote from grade-level to grade-level without learning anything beyond those skills of being a good student and being a good neighbor and comrade. In my own experience, around half of the students in secondary school cannot read, and the other half read very poorly. By the time they’ve made it this far, it’s too late for them; they won’t have another opportunity to learn. Perhaps if they had failed classes and repeated grade-levels when they were in primary school, and been cut off from the help of well-meaning friends, they would have been able to learn it, but now, in secondary school, they are being taught biology and economics and literature and they’ve missed their chance at learning to read. All day they sit in these higher-level classes and painstakingly copy notes from the blackboard into their notebooks, letter by letter rather than word by word, understanding none of it. These notebooks that they themselves are unable to read are usually the only thing they get out of a full day of sitting in school; no other learning happens for these students.

The notebooks are another source of pride for the students and their parents. I’ve met women who, when they learn that I’m a teacher, rush into their house to show off to me an impeccably neat and tidy school notebook from a son or daughter. The women themselves can’t read the notebooks, and one look at the notes tells me that neither could the student that wrote it. It makes me sad and angry. What is the point of a beautiful, illiterate notebook? I don’t understand who it is all for, who is supposed to be watching and judging this false and hollow reproduction of what a school system is supposed to look like.

The secondary school teachers understand, of course, that the vast majority of their students are nowhere near the level they would need to be at to learn secondary school material. Most don’t seem to care. Their job is to stand at the front of the room and copy notes from a textbook onto the blackboard, wait for the students to copy it into their notebooks, and then erase the board and start again with the next set of notes (or, to delegate all of that to a student so that they can sit in the back and play games on their phone, or take a nap in the staff room, or go home for the day). It’s then the students’ job to figure out how to actually learn it. Many teachers also don’t really know the material that they’re teaching. The rare students who do manage to make it through all of this and actually learn some of what they are supposed to be learning have to fight tooth and nail to do so. I appreciate the one or two students like that that I’ve had the honor of teaching personally, but what bothers me is that they would certainly be getting an even better education if they were to just stay home with a couple of textbooks.

When it comes time for the graduating seniors to take their national exams to qualify for university, the culture of cheating escalates to a national level, with networks of leaked tests and leaked answers shared charitably and selflessly throughout every corner of the country, and with teachers taking an active role in prepping their students with leaked materials beforehand and feeding them answers during the exams when they’re able. All of this is in an effort to make sure that the exam scores are based as little as possible on actual merit, I guess. I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what the reason for giving an exam is here. It got lost in translation somewhere while crossing the Atlantic or the Mediterranean, I think.

 

Good Thing I’m Here

I am endlessly confused about what my own role in all this is supposed to be, and after almost two years it hasn’t really gotten any clearer. At first it seemed relatively straightforward: The school system may be hopelessly broken, but at least my own classroom can be a refuge, a small spark of light in an otherwise dark building. At least for two years anyway, at least for a fraction of the students, at least for two classes out of their schedule. It is very difficult, trying to teach chemistry and physics to rooms of sixty teenagers who mostly can barely read and mostly do math by counting it on their fingers. Most of what I actually end up working on is problem solving strategies and basic math. Most of the students have never learned how to learn, or did but then forgot a long time ago, so it doesn’t come easy. In the end though, I would say some of the students probably have made some small amount of progress. When I talk with other Peace Corps teachers, we reassure ourselves that this is the best we can hope for, this is what our real impact is, our real reason for being here.

According to the Peace Corps organization itself, my real job is to try to improve the actual school system, as much as I can, within my own school at least. I should be engaging with other teachers, sitting in on their classes and having them sit in on mine, sharing western practices, working out alternatives to corporal punishment, and generally trying to shift the focus to what the students are learning rather than what the teachers are teaching. I should be looking for structural issues that I can help fix, problems with resource utilization, hygiene, community support, etc. I’ve mostly given up on this. The thing that I’ve really come to believe is that Sierra Leone will not be improved in any significant, lasting way through influence from the outside. For me to help in ways that Peace Corps tells me I should help would mostly involve me helping people against their will, in ways that they don’t want. I don’t have the heart for that, plus also I’m skeptical of the benevolence of countries and organizations that want to mold Africa into their own image. Teachers here have their own ideas about what would be helpful to the school; they aren’t interested in mine.

Take the library, for example. When I first arrived at my school, improving the library was something I had in mind as a way to structurally improve how the school operates. When I ask teachers about what they think are the most important things that can be done to improve the library, the one thing they tell me is that it needs more books. Fine. If you ask me, on the other hand, I feel like the library already has a pretty decent collection of books—way more than most other rural schools at least. If you ask me what the real problem is, I would say it’s that the library is kept locked at all times except for on special occasions a few times a year, and that, barring special individual permissions, the students are forbidden from ever touching the books for fear that they’ll damage them.

I don’t know what the purpose of a perpetually locked library is, any more than I can understand the purpose of an illiterate student’s notebook or a nationally cheated-on exam. Teachers take pride in the library as a sign of the quality and the wealth of the school, and whether it benefits the students at all doesn’t really factor into that. Probably I myself could change things though. I would get push-back from a lot of the teachers, but being the white American means I have a decent amount of authority at the school. I could get the keys and unlock it and be the librarian myself during my free time at school, and let the students finally use the books. At least for two years anyway. And then when I finally leave it would be permanently locked up again, and the teachers would give a sigh of relief, and grieve over the books that now had a few more torn pages or creased spines. So much of western-inspired development seems to work this way. Anything I could try to build up during my time here would be immediately torn down again after I leave. And since the teachers can’t convince me to stock a forbidden library any more than I can convince them to unlock the doors, we’re at an impasse. So that’s why I’ve mostly given up on the structural-change aspect of my job here.

 

My Own Classroom

Even coming back to the idea of doing what little I can within my own classroom, I’ve mostly lost faith in the benefit of it. Students who qualify for university and manage to scrape together enough money for tuition end up spending their four years there on material that’s more basic than an American high school curriculum, all while still within a deep-rooted culture of cheating. They then emerge in a country with virtually no job market.

But even if I avoid looking at that gloomy future and just focus on education for its own sake rather than for the sake of job opportunities, it leaves me wondering: What good is chemistry and physics to a rural Sierra Leonean? Even teaching basic math feels a little silly. The vast majority of my students will go on to be farmers, miners, and housewives, regardless of how well they do in school. They already have all the skills they need for these jobs. I badly wish that I could just send all my students back home to work with their families on the farm; at least then they’d have enough to eat. And for the one or two students who seem to really have a shot a getting something out of going to school (who are almost always the ones coming from wealthier families), I often feel torn while teaching them since the best thing I can actually hope for is that their parents will find the money to have them transferred to a better school in the city.

I have a second issue with just keeping my head down and focusing on my own classroom. I’m not the only one who sees the school system as broken and mostly pointless. Other people here see it too. The thing that’s holding the whole crumbling system together still is the constant messaging that school is important and schools make a country better, coming from foreign sources or from western-influenced locals. If left alone for a while, I feel pretty confident Sierra Leone would eventually drop the whole facade and find some better way to raise its children into adulthood. But constant, well-meaning foreign influence and foreign aid ensures that no real reform can ever happen unless it falls within the narrow bounds of what the western world considers acceptable. And just by being a teacher here, I’m complicit in this. By keeping my head down, coming to school everyday, and doing the best I can with my students, I am reassuring skeptical Sierra Leoneans that the system has the potential to work. After all, I believe in it; it worked for me in America.

I don’t have any clear ideas on how to improve things. I’m not writing this blog post in order to hint at what an ideal Sierra Leonean education system should look like. Furthermore, I’ve come to believe that I shouldn’t be the one to come up with such a thing. Offering advice here would make me just one more well-meaning foreigner telling the country how it should operate. I think Sierra Leone has had more than enough of white people coming in and telling it how to be an ideal country.

To try to end on a positive note, this blog post isn’t to say that I think my entire two years here has been pointless and wasted and potentially damaging. I think I have meaningful interactions with my neighbors, and meaningful conversations with my students both in and out of class. If I was only judging my time here on the amount of good I do for others, though, I probably would have left a long time ago. Most of what makes my presence here not feel pointless is the benefit that I myself have gotten out of it. Serving here with the Peace Corps has taught me a lot about myself, about resiliency, and about acceptance of failure. It’s opened my eyes to the wider world in a way that never could have happened had I not left America. It’s changed me into a different sort of person, and I don’t think I can ever really go back now, and I’m very thankful for that.