Education and Social Change in Liberia

This book could not have come at an important time in the political and social history of Liberia. After fourteen years of dwelling in the doldrums, the country today is engaged in a total overhaul through the assiduous efforts of the international community and well-meaning citizens, provided that overhaul takes on specific forms. There seems to be light at the end of the tunnel after a prolonged period of economic and political decline. From past historical experiences one knows that the success of this process depends on the patterns of  institutional development adopted. I have had a unique opportunity and vintage perspective in the past four years to air my views through various news organs, both community based and international, as well as peer-reviewed professional journals.

But in this book I now have an added opportunity to weave together the various themes that have constituted my focus of analysis. In other words, I now have the opportunity to present my views in a more coherent and deliberative fashion.  These views, which have been undergoing maturation for several years now, have attempted to provide an alternative interpretive perspective in terms of the nature and scope of institutional impediments to social change in Liberian society.  My most immediate concerns have been about how to establish the institutional mechanisms for power free communications in Liberian civil and political life. Thus, the views and predispositions I have elaborated in this book are also intended to establish a more humane platform for conflict resolution in the political and social spheres. Conflicts are an inseparable part of these spheres, because they are the places where human transactions and associational life take form and character.

I have become more and more convinced through experience and insight that our attempts to fashion viable institutional alternatives for civil dialogue and social change must be situated in the very nature of human rationality and discourse. In this view, I would profess that I have built upon the historical and epistemological foundations laid down by earlier social theorists.  Consequently, the basic rationale of the book follows from the assumption that the necessary conditions for free full participation in rational discourse do not exist in Liberia, given the institutional and psychosocial constraints that have existed in the country. It is further suggested, as evidenced throughout the chapters and sections of this book, that these institutional and psychosocial factors are the resultant of the evolution of authority relations in the Liberian society since the 19^th century, when the various micro collectivities in the sub-region began to be organized under the rubric of a somewhat homogenous republic and social system.

More specifically, the views expressed in this book broadly fall within the area of adult education research and theory suggested by Taylor and others. Taylor (1998) has suggested the need to foster strategies of transformative learning and social action in varied contexts, taking into consideration socio-cultural and historical forces. Other authors have also variously contributed to this theme, including the earlier generation of critical theorists, Paulo Friere, Jack Mezirow, Stephen Brookfield, Donald Schon, Chris Agyris, etc. My basic analytic approaches and problematic assumptions in this work are anchored in an interdisciplinary perspective. Thus, I have adopted sociological, learning, cognitive and developmental perspectives to gauge the behavior of adults in institutional and bureaucratic systems, because it is adults who principally organize and run these systems. The character of these institutions ultimately reflects the personalities and attitudes of their authors, who happen to be adult members of society. Thus, the failure of these systems is as much reflective of a moral and political failure of adults in society.

Because adult participants are affected by the mores and ethics of these systems in as much as they shape them, a prior assumption critical to an organizing disposition is that institutional and bureaucratic systems are essentially learning systems that can utilize the potential embedded in the structure of human rationality and communication such as critical reflection, epistemic cognition, dialectical thinking and embedded logic (see Brookfield, 1993). Accordingly, the various essays that comprised this book have sought to investigate the impact of the interplay of authority relations and institutional processes on the ideal conditions of discourse, in a society long besieged by cultural, psychosocial, and institutional constraints.

In this particular connection, one of the most compelling objectives of this compilation has been to break a new ground for a paradigmatic approach in the interpretation of institutional, psycho-cultural, and social processes in the Liberian society. This interpretive paradigm must be seen and thus anchored within the sociological and epistemological context of Habermas communicative rationality and discourse democracy. I can see how this new interpretive perspective, at least within the context of Liberian civil discourses, would ultimately be informed by emerging social and historical circumstances of a nation in continuous flux.

The book starts with chapter one which provides a brief historical survey of Liberia, an overview of the Liberian educational system followed by a comprehensive survey of the underlying theoretical perspectives within which this entire work can be conceptually located. Chapter two provides perspectives on educa