Don't joke with our education

Frobt page
June 4, 2009

A HIGH Court judge, Mr Justice Saeed Kwaku Gyan, has underscored the need for the country to develop a national education policy that will be agreed upon by all Ghanaians and systematically implemented over a period of 20 or 30 years.
According to him, education was too serious a subject “to be allowed as a political football onto a soggy and slippery field to be mauled by feuding and contending political parties or as a lamb sacrificed on the altar of expediency”.
“The hullabaloo over educational reforms in this country over the past several decades is definitely worrying. I dare say that for educational policies and their implementation to achieve positive outcomes, they must never become the subject of partisan political brinkmanship and posturing,” he said.
Mr Gyan made the suggestion at the 40th Speech and Prize-giving Day of the Fomena T.I. Ahmadiyya Senior High School at Fomena near Obuasi in the Ashanti Region.
The High Court judge noted that any country that trifled with the policy direction and implementation of its educational programme was condemned to perpetuate low productivity, underdevelopment, retrogression, among other things.
He said the country should commit itself to the funding of public education at all levels, setting itself benchmarks and time lines for achieving determinable objectives.
“The time has come to ensure true parity in people’s access to quality and available education. The ever growing and expanding dichotomy between public and private educational opportunities in this country threatens not only to ossify the divide between the haves and have-nots but will also eventually lead to a dangerous and explosive enmity between those perceived to be the minority rich and exploitative elite and the marginalised poor hewers of wood and drawers of water,” he said.
Mr Gyan said until the child born to the poorest of the poor in the remotest parts of the country could objectively be assured of his/her constitutional right to quality and accessible education, the country would not be able to realise its dream of rapid socio-economic and industrial growth.
He observed that the continuous plummeting in the standards and fortunes of the public educational system, especially at the basic school level, was because the decision makers and implementers had their children attending private elite or international schools.
He said the implementers and decision makers “have no personal or emotional attachment to the public schools christened ‘saito’” and that some teachers at that level did not even send their children to the schools (saito) where they taught.
Mr Gyan said the situation today could not be compared to what pertained in the Nkrumah regime when majority of Ghanaian children rubbed shoulders with one another, mostly in public basic schools.
The Ahmadiyya Muslim Mission, he said, had contributed immensely to the growth and development of the country since it was introduced in 1921, adding that “through its many basic and secondary schools and more particularly through its truly open-door educational policies, it had afforded and continued to provide reasonably good opportunities for many citizens to access secular education”.
He said the mission was clearly the forerunner in Muslim secular education and stressed the need for it to ensure the proper development of its schools dotted across the country to provide equal and quality education.
He said to ensure proper standards in all its schools, the mission should set up a national education board with an independent division which would not only monitor its schools but also ensure that a common examination platform was created for all of its schools.
“That will engender positive competition, as well as provide a common standard for assessing the performance of all its schools,” Mr Gyan emphasised.