The Holy Quran Asks: Who Will Receive: The Knowledge Ghana Is Now Offering?

Surah Al-Qamar's challenge has stood for fourteen centuries. Science has since confirmed that the oral tradition carrying the Quran is the most effective learning method ever documented. Ghana's education system is only beginning to understand what that means. Ramadan Day 16

Quranic Foundation:
“And We have certainly made the Quran easy to remember. So is there anyone who will be reminded?” (Surah Al-Qamar, 54:17)

At the midpoint of Ramadan, this verse carries a precise challenge. The Quran declares its own accessibility, then places the entire burden of the next step on the human receiver. The knowledge has been prepared and the architecture of transmission built across fourteen centuries. The question embedded in the second clause concerns what the human being does next. That same question sits at the centre of Ghana's education debate in 2026: access has expanded; whether learning follows depends on what happens inside the encounter with knowledge.

Hermann Ebbinghaus, the 19th-century German psychologist, established in 1885 what remains the most cited finding in memory science: the forgetting curve. Without active reinforcement, the human brain loses approximately 70 per cent of newly acquired information within 24 hours. The method that most effectively counters this decay is spaced repetition: returning to material at increasing intervals, each review rebuilding the neural trace before it fades. Quranic memorisation operates on exactly this principle. Students review passages daily, weekly, and monthly across years of structured practice. Ebbinghaus mapped the mechanism in a Leipzig laboratory in 1885. Muslim pedagogical tradition had been applying it since the 7th century.

Cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus demonstrated across decades of research that memory is an active and reconstructive process. What a person retains is shaped by how they engage at the moment of encoding and at every subsequent retrieval. The Quranic question, who will be reminded, is therefore a call to the quality of engagement that makes retention possible. A student who reads once and moves on is not receiving knowledge on the terms that allow it to hold. Active return, review, and application are not supplementary habits; they are the conditions under which comprehension becomes durable.

Ghana's education system confronts this directly in 2026. UNICEF and UNESCO assessments have documented that the majority of Ghanaian primary pupils do not acquire basic literacy and numeracy by the time they complete primary school. The National Education Forum convened by President Mahama, with an eight-member committee tasked with producing a new national education policy framework, is addressing that gap. Ghana is also hosting eLearning Africa 2026 in Accra in June, under the theme Africa's Time, Africa's Terms. The ambition in that framing is real. Its fulfilment depends on whether the pedagogical methods embedded in Ghana's reformed curriculum match what Ebbinghaus and Loftus confirmed: reinforcement and active retrieval are not optional refinements; they are how the brain retains what it is taught.

The Quran was not made easy to remember by accident. Its rhythmic structure, its division into portions for daily recitation, its tradition of communal repetition, and its culture of return and review constitute a learning system whose effectiveness modern neuroscience has validated. For Ghanaian educators, policymakers, and students at the midpoint of Ramadan, the verse carries a practical instruction: the knowledge is available, the method is proven, and the only remaining variable is the human decision to engage with the material with sufficient depth and consistency for the retained learning to hold.

Issaka Sannie - Farakhan
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