Liberia

President George W. Bush visited Liberia on the 21st of February, 2008, the first visit by an American President in three decades.

“Before the visit, Donald Booth, the U.S. ambassador to Liberia, moved to reduce high expectations, saying that Liberians should not expect new initiatives or commitments. Still, many Liberians had high expectations for President Bush's visit because of the historical ties between the two countries. Liberia, the oldest independent country in Africa, was founded by free American slaves in 1847… As President Bush has done during many of the stops during his Africa tour, he emphasized the importance of getting a ‘good education’, announcing that the United States will provide one million text books over the next year as well as desks for at least ten thousand Liberian children by the start of the new school year… He added that the United States is working to lift the burden of debt from Liberia so that Liberia ‘can leash its potential and the entrepreneurial spirits of its citizens.’” (source: Boakai M. Fofana, Monrovia, allAfrica.com, 21 February 2008)

I have done the math on these proposed reparations to this nation founded by free American slaves in 1847. I assumed an equivalent functional relationship between all books, desks, and students involved over the course of each 365 day year, and came up with two main options for Liberia to “leash its potential” through this configuration of books and desks and students. One is providing each of 10,000 students with a desk and 100 books per year, and the other is providing each of one million students with a single book and access to a desk for 3.65 days annually.
This bit of algebra reminds me of a similar differential equation posed by a school I once visited in New York with the researcher, theorist, and teacher educator Gail Burnaford. The entrance hallway was proudly adorned with the following pronouncement: “Every student in this school will read 24 books per year, and will comprehend 4”. We could only assume that the rest of the word problem, inexplicably missing from the display, was “How many books will little Johnny read this year without comprehending a damned thing?”
In any case, the future of Liberia is somehow associated by current diplomacy with 10,000 desks. The more I ponder the proposal, the more I wonder what kinds of desks the United States will be providing Liberia by the start of the next school year.

A desk, by the way, is defined by Wikipedia as a class of table with only one side suitable to sit on, designed for reading or writing. The desk emerged as a form of furniture in the medieval era, and evolved over time from a large, exquisite, luxury product, made from heavy, expensive woods by fine craftsmen, to a compact, mass-produced item made of light press-board, metal, and various synthetic materials. Once parchment was replaced by cheaper and cheaper forms of increasing mountains of paper, more and more smaller and smaller desks needed to be churned out to keep up with the proliferation of white collar jobs created to manage the blizzard of paperwork.

In the early days of my own education, school desks had wooden tops with inkwells, supported by cast iron legs bolted to the floor in rows. This was the era of bomb shelters and of air raid drills every Tuesday morning at 10:30 AM. We were taught that in the event of a nuclear holocaust, we were to stay away from the windows to avoid flying glass, and to “duck and cover” under our wooden desks to escape nuclear fall-out. It was our pleasure to carve our initials into the pliant wooden surfaces of our protective desks.
In the latter days of my elementary school education, we sat at hard plastic and chrome desks that weren’t bolted down.
And the desks began to be moved around. They could be arranged into cooperative groups. They could be set up as work stations. They could be arranged into a circle. They could be pushed back to make room for theater or for dance.

And those desks remain unbolted to this very day.

Shortly after her inauguration, the new Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf visited Williams Elementary, one of the 100 Chicago public schools that work with the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education. I wonder if she noticed how the desks were arranged. Hopefully, by next school year, her nation will have 10,000 (or one million) new educational design decisions to make.

Arnold Aprill
Founding and Creative Director
Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE)
www.capeweb.org