By Hassan I. Conteh

 “One Child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world,” so says, Malala Yousafzai, once a 16-year-old Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot by the Taliban on October 9, 2012 for standing up for children’s right to education.

Her message then touched thousands and millions of people around the world. The British Broadcasting Cooperation (BBC) had an interview with her after she was shot.

She was admitted to a Pakistani hospital in the capital, Islamabad shortly after she was shot by a man.

Malala was later taken to United Kingdom where she met with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.

She continued her education in UK. Now, she has a Malala Fund that is helping the less privileged children in the world to be educated.

She is getting help from many people, well-wishers, around the world. These people are supporting Malala’s Fund, to run up a course for girls and boys to get quality education in their countries all over the world.

The founder of Hope Horizons Bilingual School is also making remarkable progress for children in Sierra Leone and in Guinea.

Madam Natina Joy-Sophia Sarian Olu-Sawyerr established Hope Horizons Bilingual School in September, 2017.

She had earlier thought of its vision in 2015. The school is at the heart of Wilberforce village on 52 Lumley Road in west of Freetown, Sierra Leone.

In 2005, she established the English-Speaking Community School (ESCS) in Conakry, Guinea.

Horizons school takes kids from preparatory (prep), pre-school, junior Kindergarten (JKG), and to senior Kindergarten (SKG) stages.

The primary starts from Grade 1 to Grade 5. In one of Hope Horizons banner on the wall, the writing reads: “The Home of self-motivated leaners. Welcome to our school where great minds grow.”

Tarawally, a Grade 5 pupil, is one of the “self-motivated” young learners in the school of 60 pupils.

Zachariah showed great zest and passion in reading out some headlines on the front-page of a local tabloid or newspaper called, Africa24 published in Freetown at 29 Rawdon Street Daily Mail Building.

The kids are ever so willing to learn. They could interestingly sing various nursery rhymes and songs taught in school.

The teachers are amazing like the kids. They are dividing up the children into teams: Team Blue and Team Yellow. Competitions are common among the pupils. Winners get usually amazing prizes.

Madam Salamatu Tarawally is the school’s Admin assistant. She says the number of pupils is sure to rise as schools have opened in the country.

“Every child is on board, we teach very structured English and French and we use the Montessori method of teaching; educators now say no sooner the child is born, than he/she is to be in a school environment,” Mrs. Tarawally explained.

“The school is a multi-cultural school, and we have amazing staff.”

Montessori method of teaching is a type of educational method that involves children’s natural interest and activities rather than formal teaching methods. A Montessori classroom places an emphasis on hands-on learning and developing real-world skills. It emphasizes independence and it views children as naturally eager for knowledge and capable of initiating learning in a sufficiently supportive and well-prepared learning environment. It discourages some conventional measures of achievement, such as grades and tests (www.montesoriup.com).

One of the teachers, Bamba Bangura, invited me to give a short talk to kids of Hope Horizons School at their Literacy Week.

On a Thursday November 9, 2023, the pupils gleefully seated in rows and were happy too to tell of their favourite cartoon movies they had watched at home.

I agreed with them all that cartoon movies are helping children to learn easily.

The TV stations are helping kids to be able to identify things or objects in pictures correctly.

Francess Allie has been in the school for quite a while. She teaches the nursery kids ages between 2-year-old and 3-year-old.  And also the primary school children between 5-year old and 6-year-old.

To her, pictures help children even in school:

“We use more of pictures to teach the children; when they see the objects or illustrations of other things; it can be much simpler for them to understand and to recognize.”

Joseph S. Koroma looked very interested in my guest lecture on: The importance of interactive media to kids and how news is reported on TV, on radio, in magazine and in newspaper.

Cartoon movies, play station games, are interactive media for kids.

“There are changes; staff are united and are committed to making sure that the kids get the notes and materials,” Koroma said.

Moses Moseray was bold enough to admit that the pupils are indeed smart.

“The kids are fast-learners. No sooner you start a particular topic, than before you knew it they had understood. They are fast in learning and are intelligent,” Mr. Moseray said.

It is true that cartoon movies produced by Disney, ChuChu TV channels are helping kids to quickly pronounce words at early stages of their lives than kids of those days when internet was a nightmare in Sierra Leone.

Kids, for example, like us then, in those days [ 1992-2016] couldn’t have the chance to view cartoon movies since Televisions were like diamonds at home. In other words, TV sets were very expensive to buy and electricity was a big challenge.

But now TV terrestrial stations and the internet are flooded with kids’’ songs and nursery rhymes and with some fascinating stories.

As a broadcast TV stations technician at ITV (Independent television) Le Wireless SL Limited, we observed a higher concentration of infants around six months or one year-plus on viewing cartoon movies in 2017-19 when the Chinese company was first launched in Sierra Leone on August 1, 2017.

Now, these cartoon movies are downloaded from YouTube online platforms through the use of iPhones by parents for their kids.

Such a practice of viewing online cartoon TV channels has led to an emergence of what I will refer to as a “New Generation of Hi-IQ kids” in the world driven by the internet.

It means the intelligence of our younger children is pretty higher than kids in those years before the civil war and after two decades of the civil unrest in Sierra Leone.

Hope Horizons Bilingual School Day Care and Nursery has a perfect environment of learning for children at Wilberforce.

In the school compound, there are a mini-library and a computer lab. Hope Horizons’ playground has motor-toys, see-saw or swinging equipment.