By George K. Werner (former education minister)
When I first moved into my neighborhood, a family across the street decided to celebrate their young daughter’s birthday. She was turning seven. The music was so loud I could hear it clearly from my apartment in Congo Town. My curiosity peaked when a familiar lyric drifted into my living room— “Babie, enter my center.” I stepped outside to see what was happening.
There they were: children dancing enthusiastically to the song, adults nearby drinking stout, beer, and other refreshments, the atmosphere festive and communal. No one seemed alarmed. No authority intervened. It was understood instinctively as a family celebration unfolding in a shared social space—messy, joyful, imperfect, and entirely ordinary.
That moment stayed with me because it captured a truth we often avoid acknowledging children do not encounter culture only in schools. They encounter it in neighborhoods, at birthday parties, on beaches, during holidays, and in public spaces where adults and children mix freely. Exposure happens not because institutions fail, but because society itself is shared.
This reality matters when we debate how schools—and education authorities—should respond to cultural expression involving students. It forces us to ask not only what happened, but by what moral logic authority is exercised, and whether responses are consistent, proportionate, and grounded in evidence of harm rather than discomfort.
Public debates about schools often turn on language. Words do moral and institutional work long before investigations conclude or facts are fully weighed.
This is why the recent response by the Ministry of Education – Liberia, which refers to students as “minors,” deserves careful reflection. The term is legally correct. But whether it is appropriate depends entirely on the claim being made—and on the consequences that flow from its use.
In law, “minor” is a protective category. It signals vulnerability, limited consent, and the need for heightened safeguarding. When there is an allegation of abuse, exploitation, coercion, or demonstrable harm, the language of “minors” is not optional; it is required. It activates legal duties and justifies decisive intervention.
Outside a clear safeguarding frame, however, the word carries risks.
Used in debates about culture, music, performance, or judgment, “minors” quietly reshapes the terrain. It collapses wide differences of age and maturity into a single category. A seven-year-old and a seventeen-year-old become indistinguishable. Agency disappears. Developmental stages vanish. What might otherwise be an educational question is reframed as a potential danger.
This matters because education is not governed by law alone; it is governed by moral judgment.
Moral philosophy offers a useful framework here, built on four interlocking principles: worth, harm, slippery slope, and proportionality.
The principle of worth reminds us that students possess inherent dignity independent of their tastes, mistakes, immaturity, or cultural expression. They are not finished moral products; they are people in formation. Education begins from the assumption of worth, not suspicion. When institutions forget this, discipline hardens into control and guidance slips into fear.
Closely related is the harm principle, most clearly articulated by John Stuart Mill, which holds that coercive authority is justified only to prevent actual harm to others, not to suppress discomfort, enforce taste, or police difference. Not everything that offends is dangerous. Not everything that unsettles is injurious. This principle is especially important in schools, where exposure to complexity is part of learning itself.
But moral instinct alone is insufficient. Authority also requires logical restraint.
The slippery slope warns that once every uncomfortable moment triggers escalation, thresholds quietly shift. What begins as vigilance becomes reflex. Precedent accumulates. Over time, institutions drift from education into control.
This is why proportionality is essential. Proportionality asks whether a response matches the gravity of the act, whether less intrusive remedies were available, and whether the action taken educates rather than shames. It insists that not every controversy is a crisis and not every misjudgment demands maximal response.
These principles matter even more when placed against Liberia’s social realities. Over-age enrollment is widespread, driven largely by poverty, late school entry, repetition, and disruption from conflict, Ebola, and COVID-19. Many classrooms include older adolescents, and some learners are legally adults. Treating all students as uniformly vulnerable “minors” obscures this reality and weakens the case for calibrated authority.
The same socioeconomic pressures surface in another uncomfortable truth: teenage pregnancy. Early sexual activity among students is not a cultural invention of music or dance. It reflects poverty, power imbalances, lack of comprehensive sexuality education, and limited access to information and services. When students become pregnant, they do not expose a moral shock; they expose an educational gap. Shame has never closed that gap. Education has.
There is also a basic educational truth that must be stated plainly: students are not tabula rasa. They do not arrive at school as blank slates, empty of culture or experience. Long before they enter a classroom, they have absorbed music, language, values, contradictions, and adult behavior from homes, streets, screens, churches, and society itself. The idea of the blank slate—often associated with John Locke—has long been revised by modern pedagogy. Schools do not write on empty pages; they engage minds already in motion.
Education, therefore, is not about erasing the world students bring with them. It is about helping them interpret that world—critically, ethically, and with judgment.
Schools are entitled to govern what is public, collective, and institutionally sanctioned—assemblies, performances, official events. They are not entitled to police students’ private inner lives or pretend that poverty, sexuality, and social exposure begin at the school gate. Once authority collapses those boundaries, guidance gives way to surveillance and formation gives way to fear.
Across Liberia, especially on holidays and weekends, public entertainment spaces—beaches, community concerts, neighborhood events—are filled with families and young people. Culture circulates openly. Children are present because society itself is communal. Exposure alone has never been evidence of harm.
Long before today’s controversies, a familiar radio voice captured this shared responsibility. On Nightline Africa on the Voice of America, Uncle Ted Roberts would ask parents and guardians: Do you know where your child is tonight? The question mattered because it recognized a simple truth—schools are not total environments, and ministries are not substitute parents. Moral responsibility must be re-centered where it belongs: shared among families, communities, schools, and the state.
None of this is an argument for inaction. Safeguarding children is non-negotiable. But safeguarding must be anchored in evidence of harm, informed by poverty and demographic reality, and guided by proportionality—not driven by fear, shame, or performative outrage.
The real test of school authority is not how quickly it intervenes, nor how loudly it signals concern. It is how wisely it decides when to act, how far to go, and when restraint—paired with education—is the wiser course.
Language matters because it shapes decisions.
Context matters because it grounds them.
And education matters because it heals what shame never can.
Circulating images of young girls dancing to music they enjoy on Facebook—under the guise of morality—is itself a moral harm, inflicting public shame, stripping dignity, and exposing children to lasting injury far greater than the moment of joy being condemned.
