Sometimes Hollywood captures reality better than most of us. In ‘Meet the Fockers’, the sequel to ‘Meet the Parents’, a popular Hollywood blockbuster, the first word ever to be spoken by the only child in the movie was a terrible obscenity. The one year old toddler had picked the word when start actor Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) mistakenly led it out. So little Jack, grandson of former CIA agent Jack Burns (Robert De Niro) quickly recorded it as his first vocabulary on earth. Well, the word is ‘asshole.’ Jack Burns goes mad and attacks Greg, fuming “At this age their mind is like a sponge; they pick everything they hear.” Little jack lets it out again, this time much louder: “Asshole.”
That is the American environment. But kids in that country have big dreams–inspired by the inventions they see around them and the quality of their educational system. The environment supports their big dreams. Elsewhere, a JHS pupil has dreams of becoming a delegate. That is what he hears around him. Another had been asked what he would like to be in future, and he had surprisingly answered: “Sir, I want to be an Armed Robber.” When asked whether he knows exactly what armed robbers do, he produced photos of policemen in bright uniforms, discharging their law enforcement duties.
Why would a young boy confuse a policeman with an armed robber? And when did it become so fashionable to be a delegate? Did he mean to say politician or public officer or electoral officer? What are we teaching our kids these days? These are not kids thrown upon us from mars; our environment has shaped their thinking and defined their aspirations. It is a failure of our educational system if our kids can’t spell right and think big. If our kids have set their minds on things we abhor, it is a signal that moral education is not going right. It also means that modern parenting is a challenge.
Our environments are who we are. Shortly after the Iraqi war, a group of Iraqi children were given drawing papers and crayons to paint their favourite pictures. The kids drew nice photos of AK47 guns and armored cars and grenades. They had witnessed wedding parties blow apart in flames and watched their neighbors houses explode because enemies had planted bombs in secret places. They had been made aware of how dangerous the environment was, and had been warned never to go out to the minefield out there. War and danger had dominated their minds. The BBC was quick to splash those drawings on television for the world to see the effects of violence on kids.
The Ghanaian environment is not violent; it is spiritual and mostly peaceful. You would hear a lot of prayer around you and on television, but you would not see people going to the library to read for pleasure. A community the size of Stratford-Upon-Avon in England has no library or parks where people could sit and read. New housing development areas do not make provision for libraries or amusement centres.

On television and radio, politics dominate our discussions. Politician and pundits trade insults and bad language to show the muscle of their words. Where there are some lessons to be learnt, they are clothed in innuendos and biting ironies, confusing the well-intentioned and arming the evil-minded with troubling ideas. This is where delegates get their power from; we are all caught in this cross-pollination of sentiment, where we form our opinions and feed our suspicions. This is part of our education.
For the benefit of the young man dreaming of building a career as a delegate, let’s find out what delegates do? Like little Jack, he had obviously picked the idea during the recent NPP conference where the role of delegates was overhyped. If delegates had power to make and unmake, then that is his dream career. At least it is better than being an armed robber, even if it is a case of a laughable misnomer.
If you have ever been a teacher in a village school in Ghana, you know that not many JHS pupils have heard of the word ‘delegate.’ At least, our young friend did well to have learnt about the existence of such a word in the English dictionary. Most of the kids in our schools, especially the less privileged ones in rural communities, can hardly read or write. With no proper table to write on and no good teacher to explain a verb from an adjective, what dream would a poor child possible have? While his compatriots in the big cities are dropped off at school in posh cars by rich parents, the world of the village kid is limited to a deprived environment where poverty punctuates his every step.
Presently, the Ghana Education Service is facing problems of teacher deployment and teacher absenteeism, where teachers refuse postings to rural communities or accept posting but fail to present themselves in the classrooms. There is a massive excess of teachers in the big cities while kids in the poorest communities are denied any trained personnel. Teachers these days are career students, taking up bachelors and master’s degree courses in universities to upgrade themselves. They use their teaching hours to attend lectures while their pupils leisure away in empty classrooms. Lesson notes are traded for lecture notes, borrowing from teaching time to write a thesis. In the end, we produce delegates and armed robbers who had wanted to be politicians and policemen.
If we want our kids to take competitive advantage of the finer things that the new world order promises, we should develop in them a keen interest in statistics, mathematics and actuarial sciences. They should be able to compete with kids from New Jersey and China and score big in GRE and GMATS. We should develop more creative television and radio programes, to enrich scholarship and broaden knowledge. Certainly, delegates and armed robbers have no place in the 21 Century.
Kwesi Tawiah-Benjamin
bigfrontiers@gmail.com