“A Great Scholar is an Overeducated Person”

Abstract

Education was historically valued in Sierra Leone as a possession that conveyed and expressed elite status, with the revered, authoritative teacher being the gatekeeper. The erosion o f teachers' authority through government policies designed to universalize access to education has called into question the oncecertain high status o f the educated. With the future now ambiguous, students and teachers undertake "practices o f uncertainty, '' engaging in symbolic boundary work to distinguish themselves from the uneducated but at the same time undertaking the same manual labor as the unschooled. They socially level the elite and concurrently seek entree to their networks, and react to an uncertain future with contradictory practices. The work undertaken by students and teachers lies within and reinforces extant social values that emphasize the importance o f both distinction and belonging, revealing education s enduring value in the social imaginary. This explains the tenacity o f the idea ofeducation even in a persistently desultory employment climate.T h e cl a ssr o o m was d e s ig n e d t o h o l d fo rty st u d e n t s , the maximum that one teacher could be expected to handle. The seventy students it held rendered it cramped and chaotic-so much so, in fact, that the teacher, Mr. Sesay, had no room for a desk. He paced in front of the chalkboard, clutching his notebook, trying to avoid tripping over the myriad legs sprawled before him. Those students who had notebooks used them mostly to fan themselves. The classroom was so oppressively hot that many struggled to stay awake. One student fell asleep and smacked his head on his desk, to the vast amusement of his classmates. Mr. Sesay called him to the front and ordered him to jump up and down to wake himself up. His classmates teased him for his lame hopping, egging him on with cries of "Jump, bo!" until he proved with some manic pogoing that he had enough energy to follow the lesson. The giggling subsided as he returned to his seat, and sleepy apathy settled in once more as Mr. Sesay returned to the task at hand.It was geography class, and the day's lesson was longitude and time. As neither Mr. Sesay nor the students possessed the required textbook, he had drawn a detailed map on the board and was engaging the students on the importance of understanding time zones. "Write this down," he said, scrawling frantically on the

Education as identity

“…In this instance questions of schooling get caught up in the political interests of adults (a reality, Bledsoe [1990, p. 74] notes, that does not sit easily with the “Western distaste for assessing children in pragmatic ways”). Meanwhile, Bolten's (2015, p. 25) work, also from Sierra Leone, shows how schoolteachers cling to their educated status, while students “seek opportunities and networks outside of the academy” as a way of trying to assure a future. In seeing time at school as an opportunity to connect to patrons—businesspersons, community leaders—students treat formal education in a pragmatic way, recognizing its relationship to politics.…”

“…Though recognizing some of the limitations in scholarship on youth, I build on an idea in this literature that education can be a “scaffold” around which people assemble and rework identities (Jeffrey et al., 2004). The second develops perspectives on education as a pragmatic, everyday object (Bledsoe, 1990; Bolten, 2015). “Being educated” has, for many adults, a very present, political quality in their own lives; it has everyday uses that take us in a different direction from that of studies that see education mostly as a future‐oriented investment or aspiration focused on younger people (cf.…”

‘You want to be like Neymar?’: connections between football, schooling and the future in eastern Uganda

“…Building on the work of Jeffrey et al (2004) in Northern India, Jones talks of a schooled identity as a 'scaffold', something that is not so much manifested through occupation or material wealth, but a reflection of a series of embodied qualitiesexposure, literacy, development, enlightenment -that are reflected by, and reinforced through, actions in everyday life, like managing a savings group, talking English, dressing well, having a smartphone. People engage in 'symbolic boundary work' (Bolten 2015) to mark themselves out as schooled and a schooled identity can be both realised and lost beyond the school gates, partially depending on one's performative capacity. Like a scaffold, a schooled identity can be build up and broken down, and 'work' is required to keep it in place.…”