The Mis-education of Ghanaian Children

I went to school in the early 1970s. That, I guess, makes me old-fashioned, or not. It was at a time when boys spoke to teachers with both hands clasped behind their backs, slightly below their waistline, and girls curtsied when they greeted teachers. To this day, I remember my Primary One teacher – Teacher Mills, my Primary Two teacher Mrs. Dy-Yaka. It was at a time when teachers taught, and students learned, knowledge – facts about a particular subject. I can say with a degree of certainty that it is not the case today. Yes, I seem to be painting with a broad brush here; I believe many readers will swear to the excellent education their children are getting. That may be so, but from where I sit (and my children do attend one of the “best” schools in Accra, and a Catholic one too), there is much to be apprehensive about the quality of education our children are getting in the Ghanaian education system. The reasons are many, complex and varied; but they all point to an overall failure of an educational system that is certain to destroy the capacity of future generations to manage and solve the enormous challenges of future times. Indeed, it is a national security threat.

In those not-so-dinosaur-years when I was a kid in school, if you studied say Environmental Studies in class 5, your textbook was standard issue. It was the same book used by a student in any part of the country in an equivalent class. Therefore, the student from Bagabaga Demonstration Primary School or Sakasaka Primary School, Tamale, used the same textbook for Environmental Studies as their counter parts at Base Ordnance Primary School at Burma Camp. The material was thus seriously researched, carefully standardized, written in clear, simple English and presented in very good print. I remember learning some very good English even from my Environmental Studies textbook, in which a low-lying land was described as a land “liable to flooding”. Today, you read and hear even government and public officials using the “liable to” construction with “liable of” and placing a noun thereafter, instead of the appropriate present continuous tense. Another favourite one is “birds of the same feather(s)…”, instead of “birds of a feather”…. See, I digress. Simply, the body of knowledge upon which teachers relied, to impart knowledge to students was coherent and based on fact. Unfortunately, today we face a significant threat to our educational system in a variety of ways.

First, the decentralization of textbook authorship based on market economy principles has harmed more than helped our educational system. The idea that if writers are given free rein to author and publish any material, the market will reject sub-standard work in favour of top quality material is nonsensical. It is like saying that anyone trained as a medical doctor, should be allowed to make and sell medicine. The fact is that as a practical matter, many doctors do not indeed know to make medicines. This is why they restrict themselves strictly to practicing medicine, not making medicine. Currently, there is a high proliferation of writers, many of them quack writers, putting out such garbage that it is hard to believe there is a functional Ministry of Education or Ghana Education Service in this country. It is difficult under the circumstances to separate the bad from the good, and even more so when the most prolific tactic by these quack writers is to push their inferior textbooks directly on school campuses.

Second, these quack writers are aggressively pushing their materials directly in schools, motivated deeply by an economic pay-off that is strongly aligned with the financial aspirations of school administrators (Principals, Headmistresses, Headteachers). For example, these quack writers offer a share of their sale proceeds to school administrators, in return for either inclusion of their material as part of a portfolio of approved textbooks, or are allowed space at the school in which they hawk their useless textbooks. An even serious one is when purely out of dubious financial motive, school administrators patronize an author’s work knowingly and falsely misrepresenting it as an “approved textbook”, thus forcing parents to purchase a book that is not officially sanctioned. A refund is impossible even when the parents realize they have been swindled. Parents are thus stuck with a book and a bill, both of which ultimately hurt the quality of education the child gets.
Where is the Ministry of Education (MOE) or the Ghana Education Service (GES) in this? They seem to be completely lost. To be perfectly clear, it is not just the current Ministry and GES who are guilty of this behaviour. This apparent sleeping-at-the-switch by these two institutions has been the norm for quite some time. In normal situations in which there is a truly functional Ghana Education Service for example, there should be a gate-keeper, in the form of an aggressive quality control and enforcement mechanism. Such a mechanism will comprise trained, qualified researchers and textbook authors with significant years of experience, not just in some general education, but in the relevant technical aspects of any subject, consistent with established levels of education. This gate-keeping mechanism will have powers to technically review all books by authors who wish to put forth their books as textbooks. Such books will have to meet clearly spelt out criteria on content, presentation, print quality, fact, technical appropriateness and completeness. The current situation seems to indicate that such a mechanism is either non-existent, or if it exists, it is simply incapable of doing its job; or worse still, it is drunkenly steeped in corruption, in which the mechanism is just a door through which these garbage-like and dilute textbook publications are shoved for personal financial gain.

Here is an example of a garbage textbook which made its way into one school. A friend recounted an experience in which his son was required to use a particular Twi textbook. When his son received the textbook, it was titled “K?mpreh?nsion Ho Dwumadi” authored by a certain Owura Otoo, with contact phone numbers 026-666-8307 and 020-039-0967 . Clearly, this textbook is supposed to be about the teaching of Comprehension, an aspect of English which teaches techniques of reading, contexts of vocabulary, answering questions based on the text and summary, among others. Yet Owura Otoo the author, could not even render the title of his book in a simple, compatible Twi sentence. I am not a native Akan or Twi speaker, but I get along with passable Twi. “K?mpreh?nsion” is NOT a Twi word; it is an English word. In its most basic form, it means “Understanding”. From my get-along Twi brand, I will translate this as “Ntiasi?”. Without any particular reference to Twi syntax and rules of grammar, but purely on positional grounds, if I were to replace “K?mpreh?nsion” with “Ntiasi?”, I would get something like“Ntiasi? Ho Dwumadi”, which one would agree is a worthy Twi effort, given my lack of any technical expertise in Twi; but for a native Twi-speaker, this is unacceptable. For someone who wants to write a technical book on a language, it is an added advantage for the person to be a native speaker; it is even more important for the author to have studied the subject to a highly technical level. It is also important that the person has a teaching background, even if just basic. If the author of a textbook cannot get past the title of his book accurately and properly, that person, no matter what he or she claims, is unfit to produce content for the teaching of any child in the Republic of Ghana or elsewhere.

Here is another example. There is an Integrated Science textbook, authored by Daniel Bright Yeboah and Kwasi Agyekum-Hene. From a cursory look at the cover, the book has all the necessary bells and whistles – a Ghana flag, a by-line saying “For Ghanaian Schools”, and another touting Greek credentials “Alpha and Omega”, to wit, the beginning and the end. Finally, a labelled human anatomy, with intestines and all. First, the hyphenated author’s name is wrongly hyphenated. A hyphen (the small dash symbol) is used in texts in three fundamental ways. First, it may be used as a conjunction or concatenation of two normally independent words. Second it is used as a bracket, when used twice, before and after. Third it is used as a precursor to a conclusive statement emanating from a syllogism. The book under discussion here is afoul of the first rule. “Agyekum” and “Hene” are supposed to be hyphenated. Therefore, the proper way to set this typographically is “Agyekum-Hene”, not “Agyekum – Hene”. Yes, a minor typographical detail but note how the two simples are different, based on which one is in use. The first is short and thick, while the second is long and thin. For a document of instruction to young minds, completeness is important and this detail is so equally. Then, some of the labels are wrongly spelt, namely “esophagus” for “oesophagus” and “deodenum” for “duodenum”, both of which are correctly spelt in the standard computer-based dictionaries and spell-checkers included with virtually all word-processing and typesetting programmes. To top it all off, the labelled human body is a white person’s. I am no racist here, but do we not see that putting the body of a black person there might positively influence a children’s readership which is more than 90 per cent black, much in the same way that Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks and Malcolm X may have influenced Barack Obama? And perhaps the same way Obama, the first US black president, may positively inspire generations of young black people to higher achievement? Come on people! What is wrong with us in the twenty-first century? And this is just the cover page. Once you get past these hurdles (and many of us do not even notice or even care enough to correct them), the content comes next. Here, just one particular example deserves mention. On page 21, under the topic “The Human Body Systems”, the authors discuss the Respiratory System among others. They define Respiration as “… the process by which living things break down food substances…” What!!! Well, in that case what is Digestion? On page 24, the authors provide the answer. “Digestion is the breakdown of food substances into simple form the body can use.” Next question: how then are Respiration and Digestion different from each other? Answer: No difference. Really? In a long-winded way, Respiration “can” be connected to Digestion and vice versa, but not at a basic Primary 5 level; and this is a book authored by TWO people who claim that this book - an Integrated Science book for Ghanaian Schools - is the ALPHA and OMEGA of all science books at that level? In my 1970s primary school, books were authored by ONE person and you did not have such basic errors. My argument therefore is that if TWO people author a book, it should be BETTER, not WORSE; but the latter is unfortunately the case here.

Beneath all of this is a dark, subterranean informal market, populated by hawkers, who copy and reproduce all these sub-standard books, at alarming rates. Parents will bear me out on this. At the beginning of the school year when most textbook purchases are made, the demand for “recommended” books is high. Even the so-called authors are unable to meet the demand created by their corrupt and relentless pushing. Hawkers capitalize on this high demand to make even poorer copies of the texts, resulting in the use of poor quality ink, paper and book bindings. These are then sold at even higher or lower prices depending on the demand. I have had occasion to look at books published by EPP Books Services. I do not know the guy, but those are really good books. Why is this company not contracted to print the books? Clearly, here is a Ghanaian book company able to print top quality books. I am not asking that the company be made the sole publisher, but come on what is wrong with us? Do we have to be saddled between poor quality books and foreign textbooks, when there is a good local publisher and book company?

If you are a parent, you need to be worried about the quality and kind of education your child is getting in school. If you are a lazy parent, who would neither ask your child about their school work, nor supervise their homework; or even turn off the TV and insist your child sits their little behind down and do some serious work, you are dooming your child to a future of functional illiteracy and mis-education. Already, it is obvious to me that this subject matter cannot be addressed in one article. In fact, it cannot be addressed adequately in any number of articles, which is why the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service must sit up from their slumber and do some really serious work. Here are some ideas:

1) Empanel teachers, parents, researchers and technical subject experts and empower them to review all books whose authors wish to be considered for approval as school textbooks

2) Design and publish a clear set of criteria that any basic school textbook must meet, to include typesetting, technical accuracy, printing, content, appropriateness, completeness, etc.

3) Include a timeline within which such material must be revised by the currently approved author. Failure to do so by the author should result in the author’s book being dropped from the list, unless there are exceptional reasons why the book must be continued to be use despite the absence of a revision of content

4) Ban the practice of quack writers hawking their wares in or through schools


5) Design and publish criteria for publishers so that those who qualify put in a competitive bid to print books yearly. The bid should not be automatically renewable for quality control purposes so that yearly, the panel can verify that the publisher is sticking to the quality criteria on which he/she previously qualified

I am certain to pick up this topic again at some point, perhaps looking at the JHS level and eventually, tertiary institutions. For now, I wish to focus on foundational matters, for a house that is built on solid ground endures; that which is built on shaky ground, founders and is easily destroyed. Fellow countrymen and women, let us all strive to lay a solid foundation for our children’s future today.