Liberia is a country of such great need. Although the civil war ended in 2003, the devastating effects of it still linger. When we visited last April, the major question that arose for me was: “Where does one start in helping to rebuild this country?” While there are many NGOs in the country doing a variety of things to help those in need, in this blog post I want to focus on the critical importance of providing education.
The Liberian public school system is in a complete shambles as evidenced by the recent poor performance country-wide on the West Africa Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE). Liberia is part of a coalition of West African countries, including neighboring Ghana and Sierra Leone, and as of this year (2018), all high school seniors in Liberia are required to pass an exam administered by this coalition in order to receive a high school diploma. Sixty five percent of the high school seniors in Liberia failed this exam in June. In the county that my son Andy works in, not a single student passed. Was this the fault of the students, or did the country fail the students by expecting them to learn without providing a proper framework?
When the Peace Corps returned to Liberia after the civil war, Liberia requested high school math and science teachers, but in a country where the adult literacy rate is only 43% and many kids have huge gaps in their education, that seems a little like putting the cart before the horse. For Andy, teaching to that wide of a spread has been challenging. What the country really needs is education from the ground up – from pre-school forward.
The book I am working on, “Pressure on my Heart” chronicles the experiences and challenges faced by Jon Rossman as he built a private pre-school school in rural Liberia, with the intention of adding a grade each year as the students get older. When we visited Liberia and saw this school in action, I was struck by the impact that one can make through education and how engaged these children were in learning. These young students are the future of the country and by getting an early start in school they will have opportunities that their (often illiterate) parents could never even dream of.
