Address education challenges with a Senchi-Urgency
It is a season of examination results and the recent release of both senior and junior high school results has provoked the annual ritual of cacophonic diagnosis of what works or not with Ghana’s education system.
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This year’s results, as they turned out, have not been particularly pleasing, yet not too different from recent trends and what is worryingly becoming the status quo.
There is a simmering anxiety as many families, experts and commentators have joined in chorus to point accusing figures at the government and its policies.
Concerns expressed by groups and individuals regarding the current state of education in Ghana seem genuine and legitimate as current verifiable evidence in the sector suggests a downward trend in quality and standards.
Challenges in education
The lingering confusion surrounding the duration of senior high school, the perennial calamitous examination results, both at the junior and high school levels, the rampant spate of labour unrests in our institutions of higher learning, decline in the quality of our university graduates and existing shortfalls in overall educational planning and administration, are just a few of current challenges in education that require urgent attention.
These are critical enough to inform my call for a Senchi-type urgency to address the challenges of education.
We do not necessarily have to go to Senchi as we did for the economy. In fact, we don’t have to. However, the urgency of purpose and in mobilisation to salvage an apparent ailing economy and an ominous future should be instructive enough to guide a similar approach to addressing the current predicaments in education.
Take away the cost of going to Senchi and the ridiculous opulence in which we set up camps to discuss a failing economy, and everything else about the move to Senchi was spot on and good for the nation.
Also, even though the main opposition party decided to not participate in the Senchi discussions, that decision, as I would imagine, was purely political and had nothing to do with the merits or demerits of the substantive reason for going to Senchi.
In my view, the idea of deliberative discussions on a critical issue such as the economy was good for the nation.
It is also my view that even before we were compelled by the economic circumstances to go to Senchi, we should have found reason to do same for education before anything else.
My reason is simple. We can go to Senchi for all we want and for how many times, if we don’t go with the right mind-set, knowledge and attitude, we will reproduce our problems in different ways.
In other words, the problems we face in other aspects of our national development effort, particularly in leadership and governance, are directly linked to the quality of education and our human capital base.
If we continue to churn out poor quality substandard products from our educational systems and they eventually, either by accident or design, became our policy and political leaders, we should not expect them to have what it takes to lead us in development.
Human capital as foundation
My argument, therefore, is that we need to be serious in recognising the fact that our human capital is the foundation of our economic capital and the only way we can assure quality in our quest for growth and development is to provide a sound philosophical foundation for our education system.
Ghana’s educational system at this point lacks a clear philosophy and character. It lacks direction and we don’t seem to know what kind of education we want or what we want from education.
This is where I see the need for a conscious national conversation that will help us ask and answer the critical question of: “What kind of education do we want and how do we get that?”
Once we are able to answer these questions, it becomes a lot easier to develop a national road map on how to approach a well-defined national educational philosophy which then could be supported with the requisite policies, planning and administration.
The reality is, as a nation, we have failed since independence to provide character both in thinking and practice to our educational system and at all its levels.
We have found it easier to manage education through experimentation some of which, as we all know, has proved extremely detrimental to individual capability enhancement and national development.
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This culture of tinkering and experimentation is somehow relative to our political obsession with reforms — our random and misguided changes in policies and practices — to fulfil the requirement of what I call the legacy mentality.
A good example is the pain and suffering that both the junior and senior high school systems have had to endure over the years, all in the name of reforms.
Certainly, we should tinker with our educational philosophies and approaches as times and need change; however, such changes should be informed by science and reality and not merely by political desires and whimsical ambitions.
We all want education in Ghana and we want the best there is, of course. Yet, we have not wilfully, as a nation, paused, asked and answered the question of what kind of education we want.
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These are serious issues and we need not confuse answers with quality.
The writer is an environment and social development professional .
Writer’s email: [email protected]