The cliché that education is the key to success is undoubtedly one maxim seriously understood in Ghana. Anyone who doubts this may want to go the length and breath of Ghana to see how many private schools ably given the sobriquets of Academy or Preparatory schools there are. It must be given to understand that I trust Education is a country’s breath of life without which any such nation—civilised or primitive-- is doomed. My problem at the moment is against the mercenary taskmasters who are bent upon destroying education in Ghana and I feel it is only right to raise a strident advocacy against the numerous charlatans, worst and despicable than Squeers and all the Yorkshire schoolmasters put together.
I once saw an educator with the following written on a T-Shirt he was wearing: “All professionals can boast but, the teacher taught them all!” If this dictum should be trusted, then I have some qualms about the unchecked mushrooming of basic schools in Ghana. I am focusing on the primary school education in Ghana as a form of giving credit to the Biblical truism of teaching the child the way he should go so that he does not depart from it when he grows up. It is therefore—in my view-- of paramount importance that early childhood edification is conducted in an apposite manner as it is what possesses the potential of forming good or bad citizens. The massive disregard of education, especially in the hinterlands, where children are taught next to nothing; with some of them unable to write their own names (shocking, isn’t it?) after school, with proprietors charging exorbitant fees, should be a concern to every well-meaning Ghanaian.
Ghana is essentially littered with very pricey private schools, with some having circus-like school uniforms. What should preoccupy us is certainly the rationale for setting up these schools and not the fancy dress uniforms the poor pupils are made to wear like some forlorn prisoners. The first guess is that the originators of these schools are only interested in conducting savages into a modern terrain of civilisation. But, a second deeper look is all it takes to realise that forming good citizens or future leaders is the last thing on the list of these founders-- if it happens to be there at all among their very many motives. The point is that: if the doctor is held responsible if his operation of a patient goes wrong; if the economist is charged if he messes up the finances of a country; if the architect is blamed if the house he designs is defective and the mechanic is slapped with legally-motivated compensatory claims when the car he builds is
substandard; what then happens to the swindler who tutors these professionals if he happens to be woefully inadequate with the knowledge he claims to possess to want to impart?
I hate to mention this but despondently, the monstrous neglect of education as a way of forming good citizens and so-called future leaders has brought in its wake the quite superfluous production of schools by some people who see education as their short cut to riches! The prominent private schools, I will say without fear or favour, seem to have taken it into their heads that churning the best of grades out of their pupils is the best form of education without any intention of developing their mental faculty to its full capacity. I have come across a lot of people whose grades pit them against the likes of Einstein, Newton, Aristotle and Plato, to mention a few but whose level or reasoning is like that of a naked man on the street who accuses everybody of being crazy. A lot of "intelligent" people cannot even think on their feet; consequently, any problem whose solution is outside their textbooks always leaves them dumbfounded, fumbling for ideas.
Dejectedly, this is the type of education many preparatory schools or academies are inculcating into our younger brothers and sisters in this 21st Century.
For this reason, I must reiterate that while the description of the education system in Ghana as derelict, dilapidated and ramshackle may be considered offensive; I must apologise to use them as they are only an understatement with regards to the gruesome neglect of these schools and must not be seen as the writer's penchant for exaggeration. It is poignantly distressing to observe that men who have proven their unfitness for any occupation in life are free, without examination or qualification, to open a school anywhere; although the preparation for the functions they undertake, is required in the surgeon who assists to bring a child into the world, or might one day assist perhaps, to send him out of it—in the chemist whose prescription can chase away a nagging illness or rather jeopardise a rather healthy person into an early grave.
Nevertheless, the irresponsibility of some parents and their helpless children make these petty school owners the millionaires who should be accorded the highest form of respect in the land. Many are the parents whose main priority is how many “A” grades their wards can make while in a particular academy. Most importantly, these Shylock school founders know what colourfully embellished language to use on radio advertisements to get these grade chasers to part with their moneys and abet their chosen pedagogues to distort the brains of their children for eternity. Is it any wonder that we are always being taken for a ride by a few politicians whose impeccable resort to sophistry, as distasteful as it is, is mistaken for the astuteness of Solomon? But since majority of Ghanaians are ready to believe some of these half-educated politicians and what they expound to them—and with scores of people refusing to think for themselves-- the devil is certainly
bound to have all the best tunes. This is why when a fairly balanced opinion is expressed, sympathisers of some political parties and some disgusting "tribalists" route for abuses simply because of an inexplicably extreme form of bigotry or brutish logic due to the stagnation of their brains caused by the nebulous education system being talked about.
With financial gains as the reason for opening schools, these school proprietors are just traders in the avarice. These ignorant, sordid, brutal men, to whom a few considerate persons would entrust the board and lodging of a dog, form the worthy cornerstone of a structure, which, for absurdity and a magnificent high-handed laissez-aller abandon, has rarely been exceeded in this world! I do not need to mention the reasons why boarding houses of such schools have become a den for criminality, a lair for drug abusers and a practising brothel for future prostitution and prostitutes. Has anyone mulled over our education system producing graduates with no jobs to occupy them? Well, it appears that is the raison d'être of some graduates using the school system as a springboard to future “better” jobs. How pathetic! That many troop into the Police Service with its paradoxical motto of “Service with Integrity”, the Immigration and the Customs Excise and
Preventive Services as a means of enriching themselves in the shortest possible time in occupation.
Let anyone come out and say what a nation we expect of Ghana for posterity when pedagogic moral moulders trade grades for sexual favours from their female students. These people who are fit for teaching pigs relegate pedagogy to the background and end up polluting innocent children both morally and academically. With their dodgy money-making managers at the helm of affairs, the most vital preoccupation of some of these teachers who need to school themselves on how to pass on knowledge to others only force children to fill their heads with irrelevant nonsensical understanding. Children are thus forced to “chew the cud” as they have to commit so many unimportant stuffs to memory and become the bleating sheep of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Perhaps, it is apt to paraphrase Montaigne's contention that a well-formed head is better than a full head!
Need I quote Alexander Pope?: “A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep or taste not the Pierian Spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again”. We are all happy to quote this saying to impress our intellectual prowess on others but do we know where exactly this Pierian Spring is, let alone attempt to sip it lightly or gulp it down voraciously? A Ghanaian professor will normally have his name written proudly followed by a long paragraph of his degrees. Much as I respect these learned folks and envy what they have achieved, I am quite baffled that they have very little or nothing to show for their degrees. Edison, Fleming, Einstein, etc, boasted in what they achieved after years of researches and not their university degrees. We have thousands of scientists yet, we still import cars and common drugs from China; we are yet to develop a potent antidote against malaria. We have thousands of
journalists however, most of them are bedfellows of politicians, who disguise the truth of which they are meant to be a watchdog; we have very brilliant economists yet, our economy is so badly broken that the name for it is now “ecomini”; we have thousands of musicians still, most of the songs we hear are sampled from other countries. The list can go on and on but how wretched we look if this is all that we have to show for our 53 years of Independence.
Furthermore, I would like to acknowledge the aphorism that there is an exception to every rule as I am not seeking to entangle myself in the web of a fallacious generalisation argument. It is therefore noteworthy to say that there are very excellent pedagogues out there. Each of us can give names of these excellent teachers without whom we could have landed on the moral and academic rubbish heap where most youngsters are being dumped now. What I do know of good teachers is that they choose the profession for the love of it and not as a means of fulfilling a gap year to better jobs! I have overheard some graduates who go into teaching with the devilish thought that they will teach until they find a good job. Such is how the mercenary taskmasters as aforementioned, are bastardising the noble teaching profession.
Maybe it is about time we reminded ourselves that knowing all the classical Greek literature, the entire psychology books, every bit of the philosophy books and being able to recite the whole of Shakespeare do not make an intelligent person. What are our deductions from these books? We have read, re-read and memorised the Bible umpteen times but we always leave ourselves open for impostors with crooked reasoning and arguments to mislead us. Men who should be titled “Men of Lies/Darkness” have always entered our homes and led us on to believe that they represent Light. How many times have we not seen or heard two people pretending to be part of the same religion but interpret the same literature differently for their own whims?
Bringing this article to an end, I must reiterate a point I have made earlier: we hear sometimes of an action of damages against the unqualified medical practitioner, who has deformed a broken limb in pretending to heal it. But, what about the hundreds of thousands of minds that have been forever malformed by the incapable pettifoggers who have pretended to form them? I am not against the abundance of private schools in Ghana. All that I am requesting is that the Ghana Education Service adopts very stringent measures to ensure that the fellow who stands before twenty to thirty children with the aim of moulding their mental faculties is both of the highest integrity and pertinent at the shaping of these young brains.
Thomas Dickens (yesiah2003@yahoo.com).
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