Traditional Educational Institutions in Child Education in Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone is bounded at the north-west, north, and north-east with the aid of the Republic of Guinea, on the south-east with the aid of the Republic of Liberia, and the south-west 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 settlers who had been waifs in London, and later it was used as an agreement for freed African slaves. The hinterland turned into declared a British Protectorate on twenty-first August 1896. Sierra Leone attained independence on the twenty-seventh April 1961 and have become a Republic in 1971. Education is provided using both non-public and nation-backed schools. The modern education system is 6-3-4-4 (this is six years of Primary school, three years Junior Secondary School, four years Senior Secondary School, and 4 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 going on inside the school as part of the student’s lifestyles there. It consists of, amongst different things, courting among pupils and teachers, students and scholars each in and outdoor the faculty. J. S. Mill (1931) opined that whatever helps to shape the human being; to make the individual what he’s 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 which go to make a person what he is, from start to death. It consists of the house, our buddies, and the street, amongst others.
Education is to a point a planned manner devised and carried out through the educator to imbue the learner with certain statistics, skills, thoughts, and frames and modes of conduct taken into consideration properly. In element, it is the learner’s personal 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 society play their element. Man is a social creature; he grows as someone thru the effect of character on a character. Even for his fundamental bodily wishes, he depends on his fellow males and females’ assist and cooperation. Without society and the mutual support and enrichment of reports that it presents, civilization is not possible. In Hobbes’ words, the existence of man 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 an effective living, a guy needs a safety circle, a place of hooked up conduct and courting which paperwork 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 this variation in flip must be controlled by way of society’s basic traditions. It is a subculture that gives a nation its man or woman and distinctiveness as a society. The conservation of culture consequently 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. The kids nowadays are the next day’s adults; they need to be trained to inherit and perpetuate the beliefs and modes of lifestyles unusual to the precise society to which they belong. Each society has the preference to keep itself no longer simplest bodily however as network consciously sharing sure objectives, beliefs, and patterns of behavior. This sort of schooling is not always formal in schools by way of study room practice; however, that effected indirectly via the circle of relatives and via the impact on the character of social effects and customs which the kid cannot evade. In Sierra Leone, this social education covered difficult ceremonies of initiation concerning feats of staying power wherein younger men and women should prove themselves worthy of the community. The closing aim turned into to produce a character who was honest, respectful, skilled, cooperative, and who ought to comply with the social order of the day. As Aristotle once said, “the charter of a country will suffer if schooling is unnoticed. The residents of a country must always be known to fit the charter of the state. 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 now not culture. In the past, society’s nature and desires performed an important element 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, whilst 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 way of John Dewey (1897), who opined that via education, society could formulate its very own purposes, can organize its personal means and assets, and as a consequence, 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 reflectsociety’she traditions and individuality. Traditional education may be used to prepare for adjustments in society and anticipate and prevent adjustments or the outcomes of modifications in society.
Traditional schooling conserves and palms at the customs and methods of existence that represent society’s person and continues its harmony. It also enables society to interpret its features in new approaches to fulfill the challenges of change, seeking approaches or traces of improvement consistent with the traditions and customs and could, at the same time, boost society to a greater entire success of itself.
History famous that there have been no formal schools wherein children were educated in Pre-colonial Sierra Leone. The Poro and Bondo/Sande Secret Societies had been seemed upon 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 phrases both Secret Societies created a sense of comradeship and harmony amongst contributors irrespective of family, extended family, or ethnic association. Therefore, it turned into considered that children who had not gone via those mystery societies were no longer completely matured.
The Poro Secret Society is for boys. The Poro Society’s spiritual head is Pa Gbonu, seen handiest by way of the 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 instructors to the initiates even as the Kachemak are the scaring spirits. They scare the ladies and children alike together with the brand new initiates. The Rakas are the errand boys sporting messages round. The Yambas are the pinnacle boys. The Bomos are the senior prefects whilst the Sayboms are the prefects, and the monitors are the Gbanaboms. Informal training is held in the Secret Poro Bush. The subjects taught consist of 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, mats, and carving wood and cleaning 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 paintings on the seasoned Bono basis. However, during the harvest season, initiates ought to pass via those farms taking anything they need and eat 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 taught consist of making fish traps, fishing and searching net, and basketry. In herbs’ usage, initiates pay money (some freely given) for the restoration of diverse sicknesses in addition to for protection in opposition to enemies, evil spirits, and snake bites. Initiates who want to reason harm to others using herbs could ‘redeem’ the herb/medication involved. Overall, initiates are taught a brand new Language spoken best via participants known as Ke Sonor. For instance, folks trika, which means I am talking to you; Wonka Bonomi, which means Talk to me. The use of this new Language makes graduates very proud and experience one of a kind from non-initiates. Graduates come out with new names consisting of Lamp, Langba, and Kohler. A commencement ceremony climaxes the occasion.
