The Real Trouble with Education in Ghana

A Crisis Situation

Education in Ghana is in crisis. It may not be immediately apparent, but it’s usually that way with the really important things in life… the things we can mess up slowly and imperceptibly until it becomes too late.

Education in Ghana is just such a problem. It is not so much neglect that it has suffered from over the years. It is one of the most discussed sector of Ghana’s civic discourse. It is not uncommon to hear the common man on the street bemoan poor and falling standards. It is equally commonplace to hear politicians opine on the crucial nature of the sector to the cause of national development. For example, in 2012 a survey of Ghanaians found education to be the highest social priority heading up to the elections. In 2016 the former president John Mahama declared education the top priority of his government. Of course, if you had spoken to the National Association of Graduate Teachers about it, they would probably have told you a different story.

Government officials are often accused of paying mere lip service to education. But the truth is that the nation does actually spend a large portion of the annual budget on education. Last year the sector received of 33% of the total budget. In the most recent 2017 budget, the allocation has increased by about 51%. Most of the increase is aimed towards executing the government’s free education policy.

And yet for all the historically significant investment in the sector, Ghana continues to fare poorly on global education indices. The OECD’s damning 2015 assessment will still be fresh in many people’s minds. Standards have continued to fall despite investment and despite countless educational reforms. The basic education sector particularly, has seen little improvement in educational outcomes particularly in Maths, science and English.

We have international surveys to shame us on the one hand, and our own domestic examination catastrophes on the other. In 2011 half of the basic education examination candidates failed the exams. What’s more, exam officials described the fail rate as normal. Apparently the rest of us were simply late in finding out, that’s all. In more recent times the GES reports that 60% of candidates make it to senior high school.

Higher education similarly leaves much to be desired. It is not uncommon to hear Ghanaians bemoan the lack of inventiveness and research breakthroughs from our institutions of higher learning, and it is no less common to hear professors lament the poor quality of students admitted into the universities. Professors are doing little more than profess, and students are doing little more than pass their exams by chewing and pouring. In 2016 the World Economic Forum’s global competitiveness report ranked Ghana 99th out of 138 countries in terms of quality higher education and training.

Quite frankly, the trouble with education in Ghana is not lip service from Government. I truly believe that the problem is deeper than meets the eye, even deeper than the official reports suggest. It is actually a difficult problem, not so much to identify, but to deal with.

No Excuses

In South Africa, the apartheid regime enforced an educational system aimed at further systematizing segregation. The Bantu educational policy deliberately underemphasized the teaching of mathematics and science, favoring instead educational curricula that would train blacks for manual, or at best, blue collar labour.

A South African minister for native affairs in the 1950’s, Hendrik Verwoerd, infamously said,

“There is no place for [the Bantu] in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour … What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd. Education must train people in accordance with their opportunities in life, according to the sphere in which they live.”

While Ghana has never had such a deliberately racist educational policy, colonial education in the Gold Coast is often accused of bequeathing the legacy of an unbalanced focus on humanities instead of science and vocational training. It is quite true that Ghana’s educational system, particularly at the higher levels has never really recovered form this. The National Accreditation Board indicates that the ratio is 64% in favour of enrollment into humanities programmes. If anything, the skew is worsening, with more and more private universities and colleges focusing on business degrees and diplomas.

The colonial legacy, however, is nothing like that of he Apartheid one. Employment disparity in South Africa today at least in part reflects a labour force that was deliberately undereducated. Ghana has had sixty years of absolute freedom in regard to our educational policy. We cannot keep blaming the colonial system.

The Real Problem

So what lies at the heart of Ghana’s educational challenge? The answer, I believe, is teachers. Teachers; and specifically, bad teachers. Too many people become teachers because they could not become something else. For so many, teaching is the last resort when the doors to better opportunities all slam shut. I’m not the first to latch on to the problem. Professor Sitsofe Aku, Director of the Meagasa Mathematics Academy, has lamented that most mathematics teachers failed the subject while in school. I’m sure regulators would insist that they passed. Technically. For these teachers, he said, teaching was a last resort to earn money.

But even regulators are aware of this. The GES itself has blamed poor teaching for the failure of students at senior high school level. This admission, as usual, was made in the wake of appalling results in the WASSCE last year. The Executive Director of the Council for Curriculum and Assessment of the Ghana Education Service said in an interview, “The problem is the teaching of the curriculum and whether the people who are teaching it have that capacity and the skills to deliver it as it is expected.”

More recently, Professor Stephen Adei has called for the dismissal of bad teachers. He called for nothing short of “a different crop of professional teachers.”

The problem of bad teaching is obvious not only from the rather low academic entry requirements into the teaching field, but also from my personal interaction with teachers across the country, in all levels of education.

Here are, in my view, the main problems bad teachers give us:

They do not know

I have always maintained that the first job of a teacher is to know. Many lecturers are simply not masters of their fields. Basic school teachers are often guilty not simply preparing adequately for their classes. At tertiary level, where actual domain area expertise is required, it is often lacking. Lecturers are public readers of textbooks, and of late, slides. So many university classes are nothing more than sessions in tedious dictation.

The situation is pathetic, laughable, and gut-wrenchingly sad.

They do not inspire curiosity

One of the main tasks of a teacher at the basic level is to inspire young minds with a thirst for knowledge. This is true in all fields, but especially so in science. Why are flowers structured and scented they way they are? How do kites fly? Why do fireflies glow? For many science teachers, unfortunately, the answer is “Why do I care?” At best, “When do I get paid for this?”

The result is that pupils are taught to memorise facts by rote, a skill they learn well, and which they carry on along their educational careers.

They do not encourage a research culture

When I was in the University of Ghana, I took two courses with contrasting experiences that illustrate this point well. In the first course, I was told by my lecturer, after having presented a thoroughly researched paper, that while I had done an admirable job, what was expected was simply what had been told me in class. The lecturer confessed he was not sure how to grade my assignment. What I’d written was true, but it wasn’t what he’d said in class.

The second lecturer said in his very first lecture, that if you gave him in exams what he’d given you in class, the best you’d get would be a C. He told us he wanted to find out who was really a student, who would go out into the world of human knowledge, to very or contradict him. I felt inspired.

Unfortunately, at all levels, we have far more of the former type than of the latter, and that is more than a shame: it is a malignant cancer.

They do not challenge students to think

I recall the renowned Felix Dr. Konotey-Ahulu say in a lecture at the University of Ghana that it was not until he left Ghana that he was taught how to think. Up until then his Ghanaian education had only furnished what to think.

Again, this is easy to verify. I frequently ask basic school children up to junior high school level certain simple questions as I travel around the country. Questions I remember from my own time in junior high school. The children often answer correctly, and worryingly, more or less identically. Some of the questions I frequently ask are:

What is pollination? Pollination is the process whereby pollen from the anther of one flower is transported to the stigma of another flower by wind, insects or other agents.

What is energy? Energy is the ability to do work

What is work? Work is done when a force causes an object to move in the direction of the force.

So far, the what to think part is spot on. But then I ask,

What do you mean by “process”? Or what do you mean by “ability”? Or how does the force cause the movement? That is where you see the real job their teacher has done. The answer for all these questions is almost always the same: radio silence.

At this point, we learn whether real learning is happening in the minds of the children. At this point in the dialogue, the child is on his or her own. Definitions and formulae have all fled like the disciples from Gethsemane, and the child has only the mind to help. It is in precisely this place that the test of learning occurs.

Here, I am willing to forgive the teacher for not having supplied any clarifying information, even though I really shouldn’t. But if the teacher had done the fundamental job of making the student curious about pollination, or mechanics, they would not be so predictably stuck.

Chew and Pour, Pass and Forget

All these failings together promote a learning culture that is sure to perpetuate general mediocrity. Chew and pour is local parlance for memorising information and reproducing it almost verbatim in examinations. And then the normal thing is to forget what was learned. The important thing is to pass examinations.

The respected educator, Dr. Patrick Awuah, founder and president of Ashesi University, has recently reminded us that this learning culture is responsible for stifling free thought and intellectual exploration. For him, it is a “fundamental problem.”

I agree. My own assessment is that it produces an adult population that by and large, and in all sectors of national life and industry, exhibits very little analytical ability. I hear and read the effects of chew-and-pour everywhere: in business, politics and governance, academia, religion… you name it, it’s there, a truly fundamental problem.

Want to Get Rid of Bad Teachers? Pay them Well!

There are good teachers out there. Ad there are bright spots on the educational landscape. Just too few on both counts. We cannot placate ourselves with the view because the cost of doing so is just too great. We must do something, something radical, as Prof Adei has suggested.

Like I have said before, the solution is not to fire all those bad teachers. The solution may seem rather counter-intuitive at first glance: it is actually to grant teachers their perennial demand: pay them well. Very well.

You see, it is a matter of simple labor economics. If you pay teachers well, very soon, teaching will become attractive to those countless gifted and intelligent teachers who currently refuse to enter the profession because of the poor working conditions and pay.

They take their first class university degrees into teller booths in banking halls wherever else they go. The teaching profession is the crumbs they leave behind for the less academically successful compatriots to scramble for. If you improve the conditions and the salary of teachers, you will for the first time align the incentive structure with the expertise level required for effective teaching.

Immediately, as these brighter candidates apply, they will displace the current mediocrity by the simple operation of market realities. I realize there will be issues with labor law and policy. But even these tend to catch up with the realities imposed by underlying economics. I have mentioned to a few teachers that whenever they go on strike demonstrating for better conditions, they should pause and think what they are really asking for. I doubt they see it. Short-termism!

But yes, that is the single most important problem; not bad textbooks (even though there are many), or the length of senior high school education. Certainly not the difference between three or four years. In fact, it is one of the most annoying discussions I hear in our public discourse. If we keep the current level of teaching quality it will make little difference if we kept them there for a decade, and even then probably for the worse.

But something tells me our politicians know this already. They also know that despite the huge expense my solution requires, if you restructure the entire sector properly as an industry, you can probably make it work. They know that the human and economic gains over the long term will probably justify the expense, and more than pay for it. But hey, they also know that elections are always a few years away, and there are so many people to please, so many mediocre status-quos to maintain.

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