Sierra Leone Educational System

South Sudan: UNESCO wants national education system developed in South Sudan

Juba, South Sudan - On the eve of South Sudan’s independence, UNESCO has called on the international community to act with a greater sense of urgency in supporting the development of a national education system, the UN body said in a press statement, released Tuesday in Juba, the capital of South Sudan. In a Policy Paper launched Tuesday here, the UN agency documented the scale of educational deprivation across much of the country, saying 'Over one million primary school-age children are out of school – around half of the total. The new country has the world’s lowest recorded enrolment rate in secondary education. Deep gender disparities mean that fewer than 400 girls make it to the last grade of secondary school, while just 8% of women are literate.' Since the peace settlement in 2005, South Sudan has witnessed some extraordinary gains in education. The number of children in school has tripled. Hundreds of new classrooms have been built. And more teachers are being recruited and trained. Yet the reconstruction effort in South Sudan falls far short of the standards set in other post-conflict countries, including Rwanda and Sierra Leone.

Promoting Reading In Schools In Sierra Leone | Education Book Library

INTRODUCTION

Helping children and adults to develop skills they need to fully participate in an information society is central in a librarian’s mission of providing the highest quality library and information service in society. Books help children read. They are more helpful than reading schemes because they promise and provide pleasure in reading. Both teachers and school librarians should be influential in the child’s reading process but they need good knowledge of children’s literature so that they can choose and help these young readers at all levels (Samara, 2002). The Library Association (1991) singled out four areas as being enhanced by reading and use of a variety of sources of information namely: intellectual and emotional development; language development; social development; and educational development. In view of this there is every reason for teachers and librarians to promote reading in school. What then is reading?

READING

Current attempts to define reading tend to regard it as a thinking process with attention focused on comprehension. That is to say reading is a mechanical and thoughtful process requiring the reader to understand what the author is endeavoring to communicate and to contribute his own experience and thoughts to the problem of understanding. As far back as 1913 Huey began formulating such ideas as can be noted from his frequently quoted words:

until the insidious thought of reading as word pronouncing

is well worked out of our heads, it is well to place the emphasis

strongly where it really belongs, on reading as thought-

getting independently of expression.

In 1937 Gray posited that

…the reader not only recognizes the essential facts or ideas

presented, but also reflects on their significance, evaluates them critically, discovers relationships between them, and classifies his understanding of the ideas apprehended.

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