Old curriculum books released to teach new curriculum

With about a few more days for the annual Basic Education Certification Exams (B.E.C.E) to come to an end, books have now been given out to schools. However, the arrangement of the topics into units and chapters means not much work and circumspection were invested in the printing of books for the various subjects. According to Math Teachers of the Basic Schools particularly at the JHS level, topics like Histogram and Line Graph which used to be taken out from the new curriculum have loudly been introduced, silently. Teachers of other subject areas and classrooms also have the same observations.

It can be recalled that the Common Core Programme which was launched to Ghanaians in 2019 as the new curriculum came with a few changes in terms of nascent terminologies and other educational nomenclature. For instance, Chapters, Units, or Topics were reclassified as Strands and Substrands. However, the books given out to schools by the Ghana Education Service (G.E.S), the sole management of pre-tertiary schools, teachers and education in general, had nothing about the new terminologies teachers had been made to memorize for about half a decade.

This development seems to make all the training and workshops attended by both public and private teaching staff not too relevant. The things teachers had been coerced and coaxed to learn and unlearn to make this new curriculum have been quashed by the arrival of these books.

For the past five years, private publishing firms who printed books most schools have been using are the ones who have been able to publish the books according to the dictates of the new curriculum. However, these books that schools have received from the GES are far from what the new curriculum mandates. Despite this, the knowledge content on topical areas remains almost the same.

By
Martin Elorm Dogbo
Bilingual Education and Communication Specialist