By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
April 1, 2016
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I don’t know what the fuss is all about, regarding Mr. Joseph Albert Quarm’s elementary school textbook, but I perfectly understand why educators like Mr. Anis Haffar, who has taken issue with Mr. Quarm’s description of the human head as a body part that is used for carrying loads, are coming from (See “Prof. Quarm’s Textbook Misleading Children – Anis Haffar” Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/1/16). More so because the book is so transparently titled Natural Science for Primary Schools – Pupil’s Book 1.

If the book were created for use as a social studies text, its description of the human head as an instrument of porterage would have been culturally beyond question. As a science textbook, however, it indisputably calls into serious question the common sense and professionalism of the directors and staff of the Textbook Division of the Ministry of Education. As a science textbook, one would expect Natural Science for Primary Schools to be teaching about the human head as the primal seat of cognition or reason.

But even more significantly, this gaping blunder points to the abjectly scandalous level to which the quality of elementary education in Ghana has fallen, as well as the questionable caliber of the politicians in charge of our country’s educational system. One would expect the Ministry of Education to be progressively equipped with a professionally qualified board of textbook developers, or a textbook-development council, that ought to have collaborated with Mr. Quarm, as well as closely worked with the author to ensure that a book objectively titled Natural Science for Primary Schools would meet a universally acceptable standard of what a basic science textbook ought to have as part of its contents.

Haranguing the author, as Mr. Haffar, the renowned Ghanaian educator, and Mr. Kofi Bentil, Vice-President of the IMANI-Ghana think-tank, are widely reported to have done, does not get us very far. “Natural Science,” even at the most basic level of indigenous Ghanaian cultures, teaches that the foremost function of the human head is reasoning, thus this well-known Akan adage: “One head does not go into council/caucus alone.” Even if Mr. Quarm’s book were to be adopted as a social studies textbook, it would still be absolutely necessary for the author to promptly add the indispensable caveat that while it is a widely acceptable practice, nevertheless, the routine cultural use of the human head as an instrument of porterage is scientifically and biologically unhealthy, and that it has been confirmed to have deleterious effects on the human vertebrae or the backbone and causes spinal damage over time.

On a practical level, there can be no gainsaying the need for public health officials and professionals to launch a sustained public education campaign aimed at constructively discouraging certain age-old practices that may not be healthy for the preservation of a qualitative lifestyle. Unlike Mr. Haffar, however, I am no sucker for “feel-good studies” of the kind once disdainfully characterized as “Romantic Gloriana” by legendary Kenyan scholar and political scientist Professor Ali A. Mazrui.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs.