Thinking Aloud: Pacifistic gestures
Sometimes one is tempted to doubt the sincerity and commitment of officials at the Ministry of Education (MOE) and the Ghana Education Service (GES) over certain directives they give to school authorities.
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In most of the situations, they present divided selves, where they sincerely do not believe that they can pursue the directives and yet they want to win public sympathy. Over the past few years, the MOE and GES, as a ritual, annually threaten to sanction school authorities over illegal or unauthorised fees and payment of two terms fees at a go for final year students. The directives are usually issued after such fees have been paid, never before.
How many headmasters have been disciplined for flouting the directives if indeed it is not just meant as a pacifist statement to assuage the feelings and emotions of aggrieved parents rather than as a disciplinary tool against deviant headmasters? The truth, however, is that the MOE and GES are themselves convinced about the necessity for some of the perceived unauthorised payments. Such fees are critical for the smooth administration of schools. No school head could thus be genuinely disciplined. Whilst some parents who cannot genuinely pay such fees are comforted by such face-saving gestures, such directives dampen the spirit of parents who genuinely see the need to support school authorities take good care of their children.
Another of the pacifist directives from the MOE and GES, is the order to senior high school authorities in the Northern, Upper East and Upper West regions to open for the third term. The officials behind the order know too well that no headmaster takes pride in the premature closure or late opening of their schools. But where the means to run the schools are not there, it becomes imperative to take the wisest and most appropriate decision to send students home to their parents.
All of us, as a people, have accepted the policy of the state bearing the full cost of secondary school education in those regions. The MOE and GES know too well when schools are in session. It should thus not take reactions from school heads in the affected areas before we do the right thing and when we fail to meet our obligations, we should not make school authorities scapegoats to win favour from parents.
One area where the education authorities have clearly demonstrated lack of congruence between policy and action is in the area where school authorities deny students the right to sit examinations they have been registered for because of disciplinary measures. Annually, we are told by the educational authorities that students cannot be deprived of writing any paper due to non-payment of school fees. However, each year such incidents are recorded, including this year’s case of a female student of the Nigritian School in Kumasi.
There is also the story of the boy who wanted to attend to the call of nature but was refused, forcing him to ease himself openly to the anguish of the school. Then, there is the case of the St John’s Grammar School in Accra, where a number of students were denied their right because they had bushy hair.
The MOE and GES have not been able to punish anybody in the case of the perceived unauthorised fees because most of the school authorities are guided by good faith in charging the perceived illegal or unauthorised fees to get the schools running. However, with students who are denied the right to take the examinations as a punishment, the MOE and GES sympathise with the school authorities in the name of discipline and only come out to appease public sentiments and assuage the feelings of parents and students.
Whereas no one is expected to condone indiscipline and waywardness amongst students, we must appreciate the fact that ours is a constitutional democracy based on the rule of law and due process. As a matter of fact, apart from contempt of court, the position of our constitution, as captured succinctly, under Article 19(11) of the 1992 Constitution of Ghana is that “no person shall be convicted of a criminal offence unless the offence is defined and the penalty for it is prescribed in a written law.”
Some people are defending such dysfunctional actions on the premise that some final year students become defiant and put up deviant behaviour. The important thing, however, is that there is no provision or regulation in the disciplinary codes, whether of the GES or the individual schools, where it is provided for as a punishment that students must be prevented from writing any or all the papers in their final external examinations.