Every parent has the liberty to celebrate a child, and rewarding a young person who has completed secondary school is natural and virtuous.
My concern lies elsewhere.
When cars are unveiled on school grounds, and when, by several accounts, students receive cash gifts in foreign currency before a single result has been published, we are entitled to ask a more searching question. What, precisely, are we celebrating?
Only last week, in my Mathematics Curriculum class, I taught my students about the different ways in which curriculum operates, including what scholars since Jackson (1968) have called the hidden curriculum.
That idea is relevant here because schools teach not only through lessons and examinations, but also through the values and practices they permit and normalise.
Completion is not attainment, and sitting an examination is not passing one.
The evidence of learning, discipline and effort comes only after results are released. To celebrate before that moment is to honour finishing rather than achievement, and to stage that celebration in public is to turn a private family milestone into a performance.
Gifts
In some cases, the child may not even be legally able to drive the car from the school compound, while the public presentation of cash gifts in foreign currency reinforces the same point.
The gesture becomes less about usefulness and more about public performance.
That performance has an audience, and the audience is unequal. In the same schools sit children whose parents struggle to buy a textbook or meet a transport fare.
For them, a parade of cars and foreign currency is not neutral.
It creates comparison, pressure and quiet humiliation that no school should impose.
This matters even more because Free SeniorHigh School is a state-funded equity intervention.
Public schools should therefore not become stages on which private wealth is dramatised.
The objection is not to parents rewarding their children.
It is to the use of a shared civic space to perform social distinction.
If schools become theatres of luxury, they risk teaching young people to mistake visibility for merit and privilege for accomplishment.
The Ghana Education Service should make this clear.
Parents are free to reward their children, but the public presentation of cars, cash, foreign currency and luxury items should not take place on school premises, during official school activities, or while pupils remain in uniform.
No school compound, school name, school uniform or member of staff should be used to legitimise such displays.
A family that wishes to celebrate may do so privately and with dignity at home.
A student who completes secondary school deserves encouragement, guidance and celebration in full measure.
But we should not confuse encouragement with entitlement, nor celebration with public display.
The duty of the school, and of those who govern it, is to protect the dignity of every learner and preserve the moral purpose of the place.
The writer is a former Director-General of National Council for Curriculum and Assessment and former Member of Parliament for Kwesimintsim.
