Traditional Educational Institutions in Child Education in Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone is bounded at the northwest, north, and northeast with the aid of the Republic of Guinea, on the southeast with the assistance of the Republic of Liberia, and the southwest via the Atlantic Ocean. It has a place of 27,925 rectangular miles. Sierra Leone’s colony originated within the sale and session in 1787 by using native chiefs to English settlers of a bit of land meant as a home for African immigrants who had been waifs in London, and later, it was used as an agreement for formerly enslaved Africans. The hinterland was declared a British Protectorate on the twenty-first of August 1896. Sierra Leone attained independence on the twenty-seventh of April, 1961, and became a Republic in 1971. Education is provided using both non-public and nation-backed schools. The modern education system is 6-3-4-4 (six years of Primary school, three years of Junior Secondary School, four years of Senior Secondary School, and four years of tertiary/better schooling. This device is complemented through non-formal education.
CONCEPT OF EDUCATION
Education is often used within the experience of instruction in the lecture room, laboratory, workshop, or home technological know-how room and is composed principally within the supplying with the teacher’s aid, and the acquisition through pupils, of statistics and intellectual as well as guide competencies. A wider that means that instruction is that of training. That is to say, all that is happening inside the school is part of the student’s lifestyles there. It consists of, amongst different things, courting among pupils and teachers, students and scholars, each in and outside the faculty. J. S. Mill (1931) opined that whatever helps to shape the human being, to make the individual what he is or avert him from being what he is not, is part of his schooling. Implicitly, training is lifelong and ubiquitous; it is the total of all impacts that make a person what he is, from start to death. It consists of the house, our buddies, and the street.
Education is, to a point, a planned manner devised and carried out by the educator to imbue the learner with certain statistics, skills, thoughts, frames, and modes of conduct taken into consideration properly. In element, it is the learner’s reaction to the surroundings in which he lives. Education has three focal factors: the man or woman/person upon whom the educator’s effects are introduced to bear, the society or network to which he belongs, and the whole context of fact within which the character and culture play their element. Man is a social creature; he grows as someone through the effect of nature on a surface. Even for his fundamental bodily wishes, he depends on the assistance and cooperation of his fellow males and females. Without society and the mutual support and enrichment of reports that it presents, civilization is not possible. In Hobbes, man’s existence is “solitary, negative, nasty, brutish and brief.”
One of the essential records of human lifestyles is the anxiety between the pull of the beyond and the forward urge into the future, balance, and alternate, a way of life and innovation. For effective living, a guy needs a safety circle, a place of hooked-up conduct and courting, paperwork, and reliable relationships. This is likewise true of society. For its powerful functioning, there ought to be an underlying continuity of traditions and outlook that preserves its identification as a society and safeguards it towards the exchange’s disruptive results. Change needs to be for lifestyles and no longer static, but society’s basic traditions must control this variation in flip. It is a subculture that gives a nation its man or woman and distinctiveness as a society. Consequently, the conservation of culture is glaringly important.
It has been diagnosed from time immemorial that the conservation of conventional schooling has a crucial component to play in improving the child. Nowadays, kids are the next-day adults; they need to be trained to inherit and perpetuate the beliefs and modes of lifestyles that are unusual to the precise society to which they belong. Each community prefers to keep itself no longer merely bodily but as a network, consciously sharing certain objectives, beliefs, and behavior patterns. This sort of schooling is not always formal in schools through study room practice; however, it is affected indirectly via the circle of relatives and the impact on the character of social effects and customs which the kid cannot evade. In Sierra Leone, this social education covered difficult initiation ceremonies concerning feats of staying power wherein younger men and women should prove themselves worthy of the community. The closing aim turned to produce a character who was honest, respectful, skilled, cooperative, and ought to comply with the social order of the day. As Aristotle once said, “the country’s charter will suffer if schooling is unnoticed. The residents of a country must always be known to fit the state’s charter. The type of person appropriate to a constitution is the strength that maintains it as it’s also the country pressure that first created it” (p. I).
TRADITIONAL EDUCATION IN SOCIETY
Traditional schooling has a creative and conservation function in society; it’s a powerful method of keeping a society’s customs if not culture. In the past, society’s nature and desires were important in determining the nature of schooling. Professor M.V.C. Jeffreys (1950) once wrote in his e-book, Glaucon, that “in a tranquil society, the instructional system will generally tend to reflect the social pattern, while social uneasiness and instability create the possibility for the use of schooling as an instrument of social change”(p.7). A similar view became shared by John Dewey (1897), who opined that through education, society could formulate its own purposes, organize its means and assets, and, consequently, save itself with definiteness and financial system within the course in which it desires to move. Education seems both to the past and the future; inevitably, it reflects society’s traditions and individuality. Traditional education may be used to prepare for societal adjustments and anticipate and prevent adjustments or the outcomes of societal modifications.
Traditional schooling conserves and palms at the customs and methods of existence that represent society’s person and continue its harmony. It also enables the community to interpret its features in new approaches to fulfill the challenges of change, seeking methods or traces of improvement consistent with the traditions and customs. It could, at the same time, boost society to greater success.
History shows that there have been no formal schools wherein children were educated in Pre-colonial Sierra Leone. The Poro and Bondo/Sande Secret Societies were seen as institutions to train children. They were bush faculties. And the schooling those bush colleges provided became casual. Children who went via these secret societies had been taken into consideration to carry out their civic duties. They have become adults and may marry and start lifestyles. They were taken into consideration as one family. In other words, Secret Societies created a sense of comradeship and harmony amongst contributors irrespective of family, extended family, or ethnic association. Therefore, it considered that children who had not gone via those mystery societies were no longer completely mature.
The Poro Secret Society is for boys. The Poro Society’s spiritual head is Pa Gbonu, who is seen as the handiest by older graduates or individuals. The bodily heads are the Pa Sama Yorgbors and Pa Romanos. They direct the sports of the group. The senior teachers are the Pa Kashis, who usually train and give commands to different initiators. The Pa Manchiyas function as instructors to the initiates, even as the Kachemak are the scary spirits. They scare the ladies and children alike together with the brand new initiates. The Rakas are the errand boys sporting messages around. The Yambas are the pinnacle boys. The Bomos are the senior prefects, the Sayboms are the prefects, and the monitors are the Gbanaboms. Informal training is held in the Secret Poro Bush. The subjects taught include Creative Practical Arts, Performing Arts, Practical Agriculture, Medicine, i.e., Use of nearby herbs to treat various ailments), struggle, and different skills. In Creative Practical Arts, initiates are taught how to make fishing nets, baskets, and mats and carve wood and clean soap stones into special objects consisting of animals and humans; in Performing Arts, initiates are taught singing, dancing, and the Use of Poro musical instruments. Practical Agriculture initiates exercise farming. Boys are taught to undergo worry without criticism and grow acquainted with it.
Thus, they’re taken to their instructors’ farms and elders to paint on a seasoned Bono basis. However, during the harvest season, initiates ought to pass via those farms, taking anything they need and eating without being puzzled by using farm proprietors. Initiates are taught to respect elders and use guns to kill animals. In a similar vein, initiates are taught a way to use weapons in fighting in defense of their communities. Other skills initiates are introduced, including making fish traps, fishing and searching nets, and basketry. In using herbs, initiates pay money (some freely given) for the restoration of diverse sicknesses and protection in opposition to enemies, evil spirits, and snake bites. Initiates who want to cause harm to others using herbs could ‘redeem’ the herb/medication involved. Overall, initiates are taught a brand new language spoken best by participants known as Ke Sonor. For instance, folks trika, which means I am talking to you; Wonka Bonomi, which means Talk to me. Using this new language makes graduates proud and gives them a unique experience from non-initiates. Graduates came out with new names, Lampba and Kohler. A commencement ceremony climaxes the occasion.
