08/17/2026
What if one of Liberia’s biggest education problems is not that our children cannot learn—but that we often ask them to learn through a language they are still struggling to understand?
Imagine a six-year-old Kpelle child entering school.
At home, she thinks, asks questions, plays, tells stories, and understands the world in Kpelle.
Then she enters a classroom where almost everything important is suddenly explained in English.
She is not unintelligent.
She is translating while trying to learn.
Now imagine another system.
The teacher introduces new ideas in Kpelle, connects them to things the child already knows, and gradually develops the child’s English alongside the mother tongue.
Suddenly, learning feels less foreign.
Questions come more easily.
Confidence grows.
And education begins with what the child already knows instead of treating it as something that must first be erased.
Finland offers an important lesson.
Finland has built one of the world’s most respected education systems, and multilingual education is part of its broader philosophy that schools should help every child reach his or her potential.
Finnish children are not expected to abandon one language in order to learn another.
They build on what they already know.
Students may learn in Finnish or Swedish while also studying additional languages. Foreign-language learning can begin very early.
Even more importantly, Indigenous Sámi children can receive education in Sámi languages, connecting formal education with their language, culture, traditions, and worldview.
Some Finnish schools also use bilingual education and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), where students can learn subjects such as science, mathematics, history, or art through more than one language.
Think about what Liberia could learn from this.
What if a child in B**g County could begin learning basic mathematics, reading, agriculture, health, and science through Kpelle and English?
What if a child in Grand Bassa could learn through Bassa and English?
What if children in Nimba could encounter early lessons through Mano, Gio, or another language they understand deeply while developing strong English proficiency at the same time?
This is not about removing English.
English remains essential for higher education, national communication, technology, international opportunities, and participation in the global economy.
The idea is bilingual education—not English versus Liberian languages.
A Liberian child should not have to choose between understanding the classroom and preparing for the wider world.
We can give them both.
Finland also teaches us that language learning does not have to begin with children memorizing grammar rules.
Young learners use stories, songs, games, pictures, conversations, and real-life activities.
That approach matters.
A child can learn numbers by counting cassava, oranges, rice, or market goods.
Science can begin with questions about rainfall, farming, soil, mosquitoes, clean water, forests, and local plants.
Environmental education can begin with the river beside the community.
Entrepreneurship can begin with the market the child already understands.
First help children understand the idea.
Then help them develop the language to explain it in both their mother tongue and English.
That is how education becomes connected to life.
Finland also invests heavily in teachers.
Teachers working in multilingual classrooms are prepared to use visual materials, simplified explanations, peer learning, gestures, differentiated instruction, and language-sensitive teaching.
Liberia cannot simply announce bilingual education and expect teachers to figure everything out.
We would need to invest in:
teacher training,
standardized orthographies,
quality textbooks,
children’s storybooks,
dictionaries,
audio resources,
digital keyboards,
local-language learning applications,
and serious collaboration with language experts and communities.
Our universities can help produce these resources.
Technology companies can help digitize them.
Local language experts can protect accuracy and cultural integrity.
Communities can ensure that the language being taught is actually the language people speak.
And teachers can bring it all into the classroom.
This connects to a larger problem in Liberian education.
Liberia cannot afford to waste another brain.
If children spend their earliest years memorizing sounds and sentences they barely understand, some will eventually conclude that school is not for them.
But perhaps the problem was never their ability.
Perhaps the bridge between what they knew and what the school expected was simply never built.
Bilingual education can help build that bridge.
When children understand what they are learning, they can begin doing more than passing examinations.
They can ask questions.
They can investigate problems.
They can create.
They can experiment.
They can read.
They can build.
They can begin imagining solutions to the problems around them.
And that is what Liberia desperately needs.
We need students thinking about how to improve agriculture.
How to provide clean water.
How to protect our forests.
How to reduce disease.
How to improve transportation.
How to build technology for Liberian communities.
How to preserve our languages while participating fully in the modern world.
Education should not make a Liberian child feel that intelligence begins when he or she stops speaking a Liberian language.
Our languages are not obstacles to education. They can become bridges to better education.
Finland did not become successful by assuming every child should enter school already prepared for the system.
It built a system designed to help children learn.
Liberia can do the same.
We do not have to copy Finland exactly.
But we can learn from the principle:
Start with the child. Start with the language the child understands. Then build outward.
The Ministry of Education, universities, teacher-training institutions, language organizations, researchers, and communities should begin serious national conversations about piloting mother-tongue-based bilingual education in Liberia.
Start with selected schools.
Develop the materials.
Train the teachers.
Measure reading, comprehension, attendance, confidence, and learning outcomes.
Learn from the results.
Improve the model.
Then scale what works.
English should open the world to Liberian children. Their mother tongues should help them understand the world first.
We do not have to sacrifice one to strengthen the other.
Liberia can raise children who speak Kpelle and English.
Bassa and English.
Gio and English.
Mano and English.
Grebo and English.
Vai and English.
And many more.
Children who know where they come from—and are fully prepared for where they want to go.
It is time for Liberia to seriously pilot bilingual education.
If we truly believe that every Liberian child has potential, then our education system must learn to speak to that potential in a language the child can understand.
Let us stop asking children to leave their languages at the school gate.
Let us bring those languages into the classroom—and use them to build stronger readers, stronger thinkers, stronger problem-solvers, and a stronger Liberia.
The call is simple: Let Liberia begin the journey toward mother-tongue-based bilingual education.
