Features
Bringing education back to former glories
Education plays a pivotal role in the development of any country in all aspects, be it social, economic, political, cultural or moral advancement. It is one of the foremost rights to be given priority and provided for all humans. It is, therefore, a right not a privilege and every human is entitled to it.
Simply put, education, is, therefore, regarded as a platform to manipulate the needed manpower for national development. The sole purpose, is to train an individual to meet the needs of society and to boost national development in the best possible ways. It presupposes that, the quality of a nation’s education, determines the level of its national development.
IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION
An educational environment, helps people to figure out the skills that they badly need to get rid of poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and other social and economic problems. Therefore, schools at various levels, are encouraged to educate upcoming future leaders and develop the multi-dimensional and technical capabilities needed for economic growth and development.
Without a proper and quality education for the citizens, all the various sectors of an economy of any country will suffer immensely, because it is the available manpower that propels all the economic sectors. That is why it is important for any country to provide the youth who are the future leaders with a well-tailored and proper education to help in the national reconstruction.
GHANA’S EDUCATION NOT CREATIVE
Unfortunately, in Ghana, we are being told by the number three gentleman of the land, Rt-Hon Alban Kingsford Sumani Bagbin, the Speaker of our august Parliament that, the country’s educational system is not what it used to be in the past, as it teaches students to memorise, rather than making them creative.
Speaker Bagbin expressed this concern and noted that, the system should be organised in a manner that would encourage creativity among the students. “Our educational system is not too good. We mostly develop one aspect of our brains which is the memory and so, what they teach you is what you chew, assimilate and accommodate. Therefore, when they ask you a question, you try to reproduce what you have chewed. Our educational system does not teach many to be creative to come up with our own ideas”, he said.
He professed that, both youth development and empowerment, were very essential and, must go hand-in-hand.
His assertion has attracted a lot of comments from Ghanaians majority of whom agreed with his observation, calling on government, parliament and the educational authorities to take a second look at the deplorable educational system and make it functional and workable.
‘CHEW, POUR, PASS AND FORGET’ MENTALITY
It is a fact that, for many years, our educational system, seemed to place much premium on memorisation by repetition and that had become an impediment for people to be forward-looking. This mentality is based on what can be termed, “chew, pour, pass and forget” system and this cuts across all the educational ladder. This can be very dangerous for our survival as a nation.
This type of training, especially, in the country’s universities, makes it difficult for graduates to apply what they have learnt in schools to the world of work. From the perspectives of most students, assessment methods used in their universities, had failed to examine their ability to answer practical questions even in their fields of study. This means that, lecturers in the various universities are not doing the right thing, and that they must try as much as possible to make their assessment more practical and applied to the real world of work.
SKILLED MANPOWER EDUCATION
This country needs skilled people to propel its economic aspirations and a school system that can help foster that agenda of technical and vocational education. The current educational system in this country, measures people purely on cognitive ability, which is not all that we need. It is, indeed, sad that to-date, we are engaged in this ‘chew, pour, pass and forget’ system of learning and that, students have not been empowered to self-develop and learn the skills for themselves, instead, they are prepared to study and pass examinations and that seems destructive.
GES ASSURANCE OF NEW CURRICULUM
The Ghana Education Service (GES) in 2019, gave a firm assurance that it would roll out a new educational curriculum that would focus on the total development of the child and not to be an examination-focused, to discourage the ‘chew, pour, pass and forget’ syndrome.
Dr Prince Armah, the Executive Secretary of the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA), disclosed this when he granted an interview to the media in 2019. According to him, the new curriculum, when introduced, would develop people who would be able to fit into the development priorities of the country.
Two years on, there is nothing to prove that the proposed new curriculum has been introduced to streamline the process because the old mentality of ‘chew, pour, pass and forget’ continues unabated in all spheres of the educational ladder.
LACK OF ADEQUATE ATTENTION TO EDUCATION
It is instructive to say that the fallen standards of education in this country, clearly reveals that we are not giving adequate attention to the management of education and that, there is something basically wrong which we need to address in order to lift up the fallen standard. The pidgin English has even compounded the current situation. Students in our universities no longer speak the queen’s language which is English language fluently. They have adulterated the language with pidgin and that is not helpful.
Now that the Speaker of Parliament has raised his voice over this worrying situation, it means the problem has assumed a larger dimension which calls for all hands on deck approach to deal with the fallen standard of education in the country.
NATIONAL DIALOGUE ON EDUCATION
There is the need for a national educational dialogue which will assemble all the stakeholders in educational sector to brainstorm on how best this country can address the fallen standards of education across board to bring it in line with international standard to make it more potent and relevant to the needs of the society.
There should also be regular and constant training programmes for our teachers to prepare them adequately with modern trends in the profession to address the challenges in the educational sector.
The Minister of Education should be invited to appear before Parliament to give an overview of the current situation on the educational front and how he intends to address the problem to enable the country to regain its former glories in that sector.
The time is now for an all deck approach to tackle and deal decisively with the fallen trend of education in our beloved country.
By Charles Neequaye
Features
Tears of Ghanaman, home and abroad
The typical native of Sikaman is by nature a hospitable creature, a social animal with a big heart, a soul full of the milk of earthly goodness, and a spirit too loving for its own comfort.
Ghanaman hosts a foreign pal and he spends a fortune to make him very happy and comfortable-good food, clean booze, excellent accommodation and a woman for the night.
Sometimes the pal leaves without saying a “thank you but Ghanaman is not offended. He’d host another idiot even more splendidly. His nature is warm, his spirit benevolent. That is the typical Ghanaian and no wonder that many African-Americans say, “If you haven’t visited Ghana. Then you’ve not come to Africa.
You can even enter the country without a passport and a visa and you’ll be welcomed with a pot of palm wine.
If Ghanaman wants to go abroad, especially to an European country or the United States, it is often after an ordeal.
He has to doze in a queue at dawn at the embassy for days and if he is lucky to get through to being interviewed, he is confronted by someone who claims he or she has the power of discerning truth from lie.
In short Ghanaman must undergo a lie-detector test and has to answer questions that are either nonsensical or have no relevance to the trip at hand. When Joseph Kwame Korkorti wanted a visa to an European country, the attache studied Korkorti’s nose for a while and pronounced judgment.
“The way I see you, you won’t return to Ghana if I allow you to go. Korkorti nearly dislocated her jaw; Kwasiasem akwaakwa. In any case what had Korkorti’s nose got to do with the trip?
If Ghanaman, after several attempts, manages to get the visa and lands in the whiteman’s land, he is seen as another monkey uptown, a new arrival of a degenerate ape coming to invade civilized society. He is sneered at, mocked at and avoided like a plague. Some landlords abroad will not hire their rooms to blacks because they feel their presence in itself is bad business.
When a Sikaman publisher landed overseas and was riding in a public bus, an urchin who had the impudence and notoriety of a dead cockroach told his colleagues he was sure the black man had a tail which he was hiding in his pair of trousers. He didn’t end there. He said he was in fact going to pull out the tail for everyone to see.
True to his word he went and put his hand into the backside of the bewildered publisher, intent on grabbing his imaginary tail and pulling it out. It took a lot of patience on the part of the publisher to avert murder. He practically pinned the white miscreant on the floor by the neck and only let go when others intervene. Next time too…
The way we treat our foreign guests in comparison with the way they treat us is polar contrasting-two disparate extremes, one totally incomparable to the other. They hound us for immigration papers, deport us for overstaying and skinheads either target homes to perpetrate mayhem or attack black immigrants to gratify their racial madness
When these same people come here we accept them even more hospitably than our own kin. They enter without visas, overstay, impregnate our women and run away.
About half of foreigners in this country do not have valid resident permits and was not a bother until recently when fire was put under the buttocks of the Immigration Service
In fact, until recently I never knew Sikaman had an Immigration Service. The problem is that although their staff look resplendent in their green outfit, you never really see them anywhere. You’d think they are hidden from the public eye.
The first time I saw a group of them walking somewhere, I nearly mistook them for some sixth-form going to the library. Their ladies are pretty though.
So after all, Sikaman has an Immigration Service which I hear is now alert 24 hours a day tracking down illegal aliens and making sure they bound the exit via Kotoka International. A pat on their shoulder.
I am glad the Interior Ministry has also realised that the country has been too slack about who goes out or comes into Sikaman.
Now the Ministry has warned foreigners not to take the country’s commitment to its obligations under the various conditions as a sign of weakness or a source for the abuse of her hospitality.
“Ghana will not tolerate any such abuse,” Nii Okaija Adamafio, the Interior Minister said, baring his teeth and twitching his little moustache. He was inaugurating the Ghana Refugee and Immigration Service Boards.
He said some foreigners come in as tourists, investors, consultants, skilled workers or refugees. Others come as ‘charlatans, adventurers or plain criminals. “
Yes, there are many criminals among them. Our courts have tried a good number of them for fraud and misconduct.
It is time we welcome only those who would come and invest or tour and go back peacefully and not those whose criminal intentions are well-hidden but get exposed in due course of time.
This article was first published on Saturday March 14, 1998
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Features
Decisions have consequences
In this world, it is always important to recognise that every action or decision taken, has consequences.
It can result in something good or bad, depending on the quality of the decision, that is, the factors that were taken into account in the decision making.
The problem with a bad decision is that, in some instances, there is no opportunity to correct the result even though you have regretted the decision, which resulted in the unpleasant outcome.
This is what a friend of mine refers to as having regretted an unregretable regret. After church last Sunday, I was watching a programme on TV and a young lady was sharing with the host, how a bad decision she took, had affected her life immensely and adversely.
She narrated how she met a Caucasian and she got married to him. The white man arranged for her to join him after the marriage and processes were initiated for her to join her husband in UK. It took a while for the requisite documentation to be procured and during this period, she took a decision that has haunted her till date.
According to her narration, she met a man, a Ghanaian, who she started dating, even though she was a married woman.
After a while her documents were ready and so she left to join her husband abroad without breaking off the unholy relationship with the man from Ghana.
After she got to UK, this man from Ghana, kept pressuring her to leave the white man and return to him in Ghana. The white man at some point became a bit suspicious and asked about who she has been talking on the phone with for long spells, and she lied to him that it was her cousin.
Then comes the shocker. After the man from Ghana had sweet talked her continuously for a while, she decided to leave her husband and return to Ghana after only three weeks abroad.
She said, she asked the guy to swear to her that he would take care of both her and her mother and the guy swore to take good care of her and her mother as well as rent a 3-bedroom flat for her. She then took the decision to leave her husband and return to Ghana.
She told her mum that she was returning to Ghana to marry the guy in Ghana. According to her, her mother vigorously disagreed with her decision and wept.
She further added that her mum told her brother and they told her that they were going to tell her husband about her intentions.
According to her, she threatened that if they called her husband to inform him, then she would commit suicide, an idea given to her by the boyfriend in Ghana.
Her mum and brother afraid of what she might do, agreed not to tell her husband. She then told her husband that she was returning to Ghana to attend her Grandmother’s funeral.
The husband could not understand why she wanted to go back to Ghana after only three weeks stay so she had to lie that in their tradition, grandchildren are required to be present when the grandmother dies and is to be buried.
She returned to Ghana; the flat turns into a chamber and hall accommodation, the promise to take care of her mother does not materialise and generally she ends up furnishing the accommodation herself. All the promises given her by her boyfriend, turned out to be just mere words.
A phone the husband gave her, she left behind in UK out of guilty conscience knowing she was never coming back to UK.
Through that phone and social media, the husband found out about his boyfriend and that was the end of her marriage.
Meanwhile, things have gone awry here in Ghana and she had regretted and at a point in her narration, was trying desperately to hold back tears. Decisions indeed have consequences.
NB: ‘CHANGE KOTOKA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO KOFI BAAKO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT’
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