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I came to EducAid in the summer of 2007 with little idea of what to expect from Sierra Leone or the school itself. I was excited by being able to help at a free school in a place where education had never meant advancement in itself, and in a country which would be facing its first independent elections (that summer) since the civil war. If I had vague plans and hopes, Miriam had precise ones. She set me up straight away with her most advanced literature students. EducAid students have the most trouble with the literature section of the college entrance exam mainly because the questions can be arbitrary and the answers more so. Students who have difficulty with basic English are examined on the niceties of a book (in this case, Hamlet) and frequently one side of an interpretative matter is viewed as simply 'wrong'. One wonders whether the high marks won by those at the premier private schools in the country are due to inside knowledge or the excellence of their education. So Miriam wanted me to try to help her students perform better on the literature exam by offering a special class over the summer for those interested. I had twenty-five students who piled into our classroom twice a day (for six hours) as I ran literature (and English) bootcamp. The vocabulary was grueling. Syntax (especially in Hamlet) can be tortuous. But my stalwart students plied away until we had finished the play (and another, and the readings for the poetry section).

In the course of teaching the class, I realised that what I valued most about the education I had received in literature was learning how to debate, and how to express myself. Without steering too far from the examination syllabus, I started to ask my students to have debates about the play, and to try to match each other with arguments based on the text. Soon, outside of class, I realised that the debates which my students (and their elders and peers) carried on about politics often suffered from the same problems I witnessed in the classroom. They quickly turned into shouting matches with little consideration of the evidence. (Not unlike many such debates in the UK or the US, in fact.) Many of my students were going to vote in the election. I didn't have an opinion about the leaders in Sierra Leone (I myself knew little about their positions or their backgrounds), but I wanted my students to vote in a way that they understood, and that they could defend by argument. So I started taking groups of students to the party headquarters in Freetown. Some parties could care less that a few of their constituents showed up asking for information. Others put on a great show. One office (I can't remember which) couldn't ascertain which of its members was running for office in our local election! We eventually gathered the names and contact information of our local candidates, and got them to come, one by one, to speak to the whole school. The results were sometimes uproarious, but they gave my students information to add to their debates. When we had finished our literature debates, I began to ask my students to debate politics, and, much to their dismay, sometimes asked them to argue the side opposed to their own. Some of my students admitted that they had reconsidered serious positions after the debates. On my last weekend in Freetown, I was able to walk to the polls with young men and women who were making choices which (at least some of them) could defend in an argument. 

Harvey

Harvey with the cast of the first ever Krio production of Julius Caesar.