Policies of Yesteryears: Our Nation's Education on the Precipice

Ghana's drowning prestige as one of Africa's premier epicenters for critical scholarship is a worry to me and many well meaning Ghanaians. Despite my unease, and shame with the declining quality of our nation's current education, there are those who still think that the marginal interventionist policies of our government, and sermonized political speeches, are enough to reverse our nation's lost fortunes in knowledge-production and dissemination. If platitudes were, and are, solutions, Ghana would have by now become a colossus, and towered over many 'Third World' nation-states, given our nation's excessive use of the 'Onyame Bekyere'? and 'Onyame Beye'? thinking that, such unnecessary clich's will address Ghana's man-made problems. Personally, I think God has gone deaf, and his auditory system has built immunity against our lazy supplications for divine intercession.

In 21st century Ghana, the pressure of wanting to create "little America"? in our Ghanaian homes, and schools, sickens me. While schools play invaluable role humankind's acquisition and preservation of society's intellectual heritage, conceptual analysis, and marketable skills for the new economy, the desire of Ghanaians wanting to speak like 'Whites,'? while they croak like choking frogs, is a mockery to our nation's intellectual development. The many incendiary comments we read from some commentators on Ghanaweb, and the unscholarly interjections by some lettered persons, to simple questions, are testaments to our nation’s failing education system, and its long-term implications for Ghana in the new competitive world order.

As a nation, we cannot obituarize the deepening problems in our nation’s education, particularly the many under-funded public schools, thinking that the acquisition of fragmented bookish knowledge, and verbal articulation, is enough education. It is not; although the cited qualities remain key components of formal education among many other salient variables, which have eluded our nation’s education since the beginning of the 1980s.

Despite the celebratory speeches of the Ghanaian leadership that, the state has implemented universal access to education, the unevenness in resource distribution to the nation’s schools makes me question whether the Ghanaian government is aware of the awful state of some of our nation’s schools. Maybe, a summer trek through the mountains of Dzogbekofe would be enough to humble our policymakers, and detached politicians, to accept the revolting reality that, all is not well with our schools.

By peripherializing our nation’s public schools, and slowly replacing many of them with private schools and Church-funded universities, the government is complicit in promoting exclusionist policies in the nation’s education system. This polarity does not only contribute to lessening the confidence in some of our nation bright students from disadvantaged backgrounds, it also solidifies growing elitism in our nation’s education. It is therefore not surprising to seeing high dropout rates among the nation’s under-funded schools vis-? -vis the burgeoning private institutions attended by the nation’s middle-and-upper-class. Without critical assessment of events, a section of the Ghanaian society’s unfairly attribute the high failing rates in our nation’s resource-strapped schools to the apathy of underprivileged students to engage in intellectual activism. With this state of mind, many of us have either failed, or refused, to explore the causes behind the differentials in educational outcomes, which are rooted in our nation’s antiquated policies on education reforms.

By relying extensively on the Church, and uncommitted school proprietors, to fill the void without regulatory oversights, the Ghanaian state has abdicated its traditional responsibility to promote universal and adequate education for its citizens, especially the nation’s marginalized, population. By mortgaging the future of our nation’s education to Ghana’s corporate-Churches, Ghana’s neo-colonial leadership is an accessory in undermining our nation’s intellectual growth, and the strength of the Ghanaian mind to protect secularism and universal tolerance in our nation’s schools. Recently, I was saddened to read in one of the nation’s newspapers that, the All Nation University forbids freedom of worship, and the wearing of trousers by the university’s female students. When did Reverend Kwabena Donkor become a constitutional expert on religious freedoms, and institutional morality? In Ghana, the contemptible becomes a political rule when the government, and certain state officials allow themselves to be bankrolled by corporate-churches.

The Ghanaian government has without cause placed the nation’s education in the hands of Ghanaian Churches, some of which, without any merit, have awarded doctoral degrees to their pastors after six-month of enrolment in non-accredited institutions. Despite the public’s soft objections, our badly informed government continues to bedmate with some Churches, and their dishonorable heads to establish “universities” in Ghana to offset the problems of over-enrolment in our nation’s traditional universities. Ghana has enough pastors and reverends, and does need clergies who use the Bible, and their unworthy academic credentials to veil their malicious intentions by riding high on the tailcoat of the government, and ignorance of the Ghanaian public.

What is the functional value of the title, Reverend-Doctor, Reverend Professor, or His Holiness- Reverend-Doctor-Professor-Emeritus to the nation’s intellectual development? None, in my personal opinion. Was Jesus Christ a Rabbi-Doctor if I may ask with a smirk? I wish our nation’s so-called Reverend Doctors would have the opportunity to debate real theologians who acquired their doctorate(s) having spent ten, or more, years at institutions of advanced learning to establish authority in their field of scholarship.

In addition to the preceding, our government’s promotion of European knowledge in our nation’s schools, with little accommodation for indigenous knowledge production is also partially responsible for the increasing underachievement in the nation’s marginalized schools. While our government is quick to condemn colonialism as the underlying cause of our nation’s underdevelopment, which is true to an extent, certain aspects of our curriculum development continue to perpetuate Eurocentric teachings, and the codification of students who articulate their thoughts better in English as intellectually superior over their peers who speak, and write in, the indigenous language. Either out of sheer ignorance, and greediness, our government continues to import foreign textbooks, without offering equal quota to indigenous writers. This behaviour constitutes textual racism; a travesty of knowledge production, which feeds into the false notion of White supremacy, and Black inferiority. After all, in my judgment, the Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is not any better than “Kofi Amevoe” and “Amedeke Menya Etso Me o”

I must also state without mincing words that, the linearity in, and the unfair universalization of, Western knowledge production in our schools have alienated some of or nation’s students. In many of the nation’s deprived rural areas, the constitution, and delivery of core curriculum courses has made the school environment less welcoming for many marginalized students. Here, certain native students who are pressured to speak English, and who do not have the cultural capital to do so, find the school environment to be less assuring and accommodating. Many of us are witness to the caning of students by some teachers because of the former’s inability to express themselves in English. In one village, a teacher forced students who could not answer his questions in English to pay money as punishment. I admit in earnest that, one of my cousins was a victim to the Stalinist policy of a village teacher who demanded that he (i.e. my cousin) explain in English why he should not be given twelve “lashes” for coming late to school.

In my humble estimation, the laissez-faire attitude of the government to reverse this grave problem will make assembly plants out of many of the nation’s public schools. Here, graduates will either be labeled as idiots after graduation, or undeserving human products, who do not meet the intellectual requirements for an office position, and should therefore be relegated to the wilderness of idleness to add to the rising numbers of the nation’s unemployed, some of whom later on in life become armed robbers. I hope you see the positive correlation between the state’s neglect of our schools, and increased public safety apprehensions among Ghanaians over the exponential increase in criminality.

Our nation’s cultural fetish that, we rely on the magnanimity of our government, profit-minded Churches and educators, to address the leaching ineffectuality in our public schools is not enough. The good intentions of the Ghanaian leadership cannot be relied upon to generate the needed academic improvements in our schools, especially when politicians, the Reverend-Doctors, and educators are hitched to each other on the hip, and see nothing seriously wrong with the growing disenchantment in our schools. Without far-reaching reforms to our nation’s education system, the future of our country looks bleak. Let’s join the fight for verifiable institutional reforms, and remind our politicians that, the nurturing of our nation’s education is our number one bulwark against re-colonization. Hope all is well. Good day and cheers.