Creating from models and moulds - The case of university education in modern Ghana
The reader should not be led by the title of today’s piece to have great expectations. I am not going to launch into a treatise on tertiary education. I am not of the pedigree that can do justice to such a subject in a widely-read newspaper such as the Daily Graphic.
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I only want to recount my humble experience of creating things either with my own hands or simply watching other people create them.
I was not quite seven years old when I was apprenticed to a master goldsmith with the condition that I could receive my freedom (certification) at 24.
This was the age that apprentices were considered mature and skilled enough to set up their own workshop. In my case, it would have meant 17 long years of apprenticeship.
It did not bother me because I was very young; my parents were the ones to reflect rationally on a future for me. Rather, I was very fascinated watching my master and my seniors create beautiful pieces of jewel. They melted metals and poured the red-hot liquid into a container with a pattern.
It appeared magic to me when the liquid cooled slowly and became solid in the shape of the pattern such as a butterfly, star or an animal. Ironically, I did not stay long enough to be certified as a master goldsmith as in my seventh year of apprenticeship, I decided to go to school. But the lessons of working from moulds stuck with me.
Later in life when I was the Technical Director of a beverage company, I used to spend a lot of hours with bottle manufacturers, inspecting their processes. I was very particular about the condition of the moulds into which molten glass was poured to form bottles. If the condition of the mould was poor; if the right temperature was not attained in melting the glass or if the cooling of the molten glass was done too quickly; the product was a batch of defective bottles which was scrapped as waste.
In recent years, I am thrilled by the thought that a great many busts that adorn the palaces of some great Asante chiefs and some statues in churches in Kumasi were manufactured in one of my carports converted into a sculptor’s workshop by one of the Fraziers. Here, he works from clay.
He kneads special clay into a thick, smooth paste. Working patiently from photographs of a client taken from various angles, he constructs the image. This process, called modelling, produces a clay image which, as far possible, resembles the client. It requires skill and time.
Next, he creates a mould around the model with POP which dries up and carries an imprint of the model. The mould is carefully removed from the model and a new material called “resin” is melted and poured inside the mould.
The resin takes the exact image of the mould and therefore the resemblance of the client. In the past few years many young sculptors without much training have set up shop and, as should be expected, the quality of the sculpture pieces one sees around are varied, with the poor ones in the majority.
Living very close to a leading public university and having to visit the campus often, I try to keep myself abreast of the challenges confronting tertiary education.
I can feel the overcrowding by the press of human bodies and see the frustration in the eyes. Access to public university education is very limited and the policy is to cream off those candidates considered the brightest and the flotsam must find places in the numerous private universities that have sprung up. Nearly all the new institutions are affiliated to the established public universities which are themselves battling with the challenges of inadequate infrastructure, insufficient tuition in theory and practical work and weak oversight. Students are made to rush through their courses too fast. Additionally, there are inadequate innovative programmes (the real academic moulds) that should prepare graduates for self-employment in a tough job market. These private universities are being rolled off bad models.
A new study carried out (and yet to be released) by the British Council in Ghana, Kenya, Uganda and South Africa has revealed that the quality of university graduates has been dodgy.
It further states that employers make do with what they get, preferring to recruit graduates from public universities and only very few from some prestigious private institutions.
There are doubts about the products of the universities, some of which are expanding at rates they do not have the resources to sustain. One asks: Are the Council for Higher Education and the councils of the various universities auditing the condition of the models and moulds from which graduates are being farmed out from both the public and the private universities?