Ghana’s Educational Musical Chairs.

My beloved country, Ghana is over 50 years, and for those past years, we have been undergoing reforms of all kinds. We never get tired of reforms. We create, destroy, form, reform and then we create and start the whole process again. It’s almost like some sort of obsession or disease. Maybe it’s those donors- everyone of them has conditions attached to their money. But if it means starting something new so that a chief executive of a government institution somewhere can have something “small” in his pocket, why not? As long as the donors are happy that we are doing something useful and the money keeps coming, he is sure to finish that five bedroom apartment at East Legon in time before Christmas.

Last week, we were told that the Basic Education results were in and once again a good proportion of the candidates did not make it, and another chunk had their results cancelled for various examination offences (570 we are told).

Of course no one has to take blame. No one will. Well, apart from the poor kids who desperately wanted to pass even though they had not been adequately prepared? They were all lazy students who did not learn. That is the verdict out there. The real reason? They were inadequately prepared by those who made them sit for those exams. Simple as that.

You would think that with such high failure and cheating rates over the years, some persons at the education service and education ministry would take responsibility and would have resigned for these perennial happenings during examinations. Maybe it’s happened so many times that when failures and disasters to occur in the system no one is expected to take responsibility. Ghanaians it seems, do not require anyone to be accountable. National institutions and their heads are not made to sign performance agreements of any sort and so we just trudge on.

It’s also amazing when you hear these heads of institutions mount the podium and blame the students for their poor performance. Right now, the mantra is that Ghanaian graduates are of low quality. Maybe true, but which factories are churning out these low quality products? Is it that the raw materials are so bad or there is a fundamental flaw with our educational system?

I am yet to meet any student who wants come bottom of the class. Of course there would the ones who may have academic challenges of sorts and so may not meet the standard pass marks set by academic institutions but could such students not have alternative ways of instruction and leaning methods- alas, there is none; you are either in or out.

The real issue is that leadership over the years have consistently failed group after group of students. You see right after independence, the educational sector has had lots of its fair share of reforms. We endured the British educational system, which we inherited from our departing colonial masters.

Then a bureaucrat somewhere had a brainwave! You see the British system was designed to churn out clerks and scribes to enable them effectively conduct their trading activities. Now that we are independent, we needed to over-haul the system and make sure that the current educational system was in tune with our manpower needs. Brilliant idea! But then that’s how our problems started. Fifty years on, we are still reforming. Yes, the devils of the old system are such entrenched and multifaceted beasts that over all these years we still trying to exorcise them.

So the GCSE system was abandoned. A and O levels were no more. We became the experiments of these new systems. In came the Junior and Secondary School Systems. New subjects were introduced, others were dropped. In the end, some of us had to write twelve (12) papers at the Basic examination. And woe unto you if if did not get twelve ones. (The results were graded from one to nine, with one meaning excellent and so forth). The original idea of going through these grueling twelve papers was that no matter the grades a student got, these were just basic examinations and so no one was considered to have failed. Indeed the examination council does not offer retakes of these exams. The best?? senior secondary schools in turn started selecting prospective students by first going through the list of twelve ones and gradually working their way down. So if you had six or five ones it meant that you probably had to kiss your preferred choice of “good” secondary school good-bye. Of course if your parents could push a fat brown envelope under the headmaster’s desk your name would magically appear on the admissions list even if they had a large notice at the school gate which said no admissions. And it helped if your parents or an uncle were old boys, went to church with the headmaster or knew the right persons in these schools.

But it didn’t stop there. Some of these new courses did not have syllabi. Subjects that had any didn’t have textbooks. And those which even had textbooks did not have qualified teachers for the subjects concerned so we had to struggle with what we had. And when whoever happens to be in charge of education had a dream- like the type Joseph had in the Bible about drought in Egypt, changes were made to save us all. These were holy visions from the great gods and ancestors and had to be obeyed. I wonder when the dust would finally settle. Currently there’s another saviour for the deformed educational system. There has been a new remix of sorts of the educational sector again and we are all singing a new chorus. Secondary school is now four years and by the way there are no more secondary schools in Ghana. They are now called High Schools. Every school is frantically trying to change their signpost to reflect the refreshing new change. It’s probably a good time to be a signpost writer. I just wonder what’s next.

But if I go on, I don’t think I’ll end this piece.

Its amazing that students of yesterday, who went on demonstrations because they ate too much free chicken at the canteens, were showered with too much milk , had unending choices of rooms to sleep in, had good allowances (note: not loans) and other items should turn back and say that the quality of graduates coming out of Universities now are of low quality when they have failed to provide even a hint of what was provided them to successive generations.

But you know the funny thing about this whole mess? The big people in society who were the DJ’s of our wonderful academic musical chairs did not school their children in this mess. No. They all bundle their children unto planes and gain admission for them in Ivy league schools somewhere in America or their counterpart schools in Europe. When asked how they finance the expensive schooling of their wards, they blame their rich friends. It seems Ghanaian politicians whose salaries are not much suddenly get super rich friends willing to school their children in expensive schools and buy them expensive houses all for free.

So the next time someone mounts the podium to complain about the quality of students coming out of universities in Ghana just let them know of one of my favourite computing terms- GIGO- Garbage In Garbage Out. We did not educate ourselves. We were brought up by a society that expects brilliant graduates after these students have laboured through a ghastly educational system that provided both teachers and students with the wrong tools (that is if any tools were provided) from day one.

Maybe it’s a tacit admission of their failures. They are ashamed of what they have turned us into. Maybe it’s their way of saying sorry for in Ghanaian society, adults don’t apologise to kids no matter the offence.

Tags: education, examinations, ghana