How Ghana’s ‘Old School’ Teaching Is Still Running (And Ruining) The Country

Ghana's beloved old-school teaching methods – the ones some of us proudly reminisce about, the ones that produced “disciplined” products who can recite the nine uses of the cocoa plant, the chemical periodic table, Pythagoras's theorem and the Archimedes hypothesis in their sleep – might actually be the reason the country can't actually get anywhere.

Is that statement blasphemy? Maybe. But let's be very honest for a minute. The foundation of Ghana's education system was never designed by us, for us. It was designed by British colonial administrators who needed one thing and one thing only: obedient middlemen who could take orders, file paperwork, worship the civil service, and not ask questions.

So here we are, 70 years later, and we are still teaching the same way: teacher at the blackboard, students copying notes, studying by rote, being forced to buy teachers' notes, exam at the end, and then repeating the cycle for the next batch.

The result? A population brilliantly trained to receive instructions and staggeringly ill-equipped to think for themselves. And we wonder why decision-making in this country looks like a game of catching a hot piece of yam, where everyone passes responsibility until it reaches someone who also, surprisingly, doesn't know what to do.

The simple truth is that when you spend 12 years being rewarded for memorising facts you'll never use, you don't suddenly become an innovative or creative thinker the day you graduate. You become someone who waits to be told what to do.

Someone who struggles to identify what actually matters when gifted with information. Someone who, when placed in a leadership position, reaches for the same tired, useless, pointless solutions that have been failing for decades.

Look at our governance. Look at our businesses. How many people in positions of authority are really equipped to analyse a complex problem, weigh competing priorities and make a decision? Or are most of them waiting for the “marking scheme” to somehow guide them?

And (here's the real tragedy) the rare Ghanaian who emerges from this system with a genuinely creative thought doesn't get to do anything with it. Not because the idea is bad, but because any idea that doesn't come with party colours attached to it is treated with suspicion.

We have perfected the art of bowing to political pressure so thoroughly that even common sense has to seek permission before it speaks.

A brilliant proposal for a local manufacturing plant? “Which MP's constituency gets the credit? “An innovative reform for education itself? “Doesn't align with the minister's agenda.” A simple, sensible solution that everyone in the room knows will work? “Let me run it by the party HQ first.”

We have trained ourselves to ignore good judgment, insult initiative, and suspend the very basic reasoning we were allegedly taught in school to avoid stepping on the wrong political toes. The result is a country drowning in good ideas, which die waiting for someone, who was afraid of someone else, who was also just afraid, to sign off. And we call that wisdom.

We love to complain that young Ghanaians aren't enterprising enough; in fact, we have frequent workshops for that purpose. There are more entrepreneur workshops and conferences in Ghana than any other type of organised meeting.

We pretend to want to encourage the youthful and agile mind until a young person actually tries something different, at which point we call them “wayward,” “too known,” or “stepping outside their lane” and ask why they are so disrespectful and so not understanding of the order of things.

Our education system punishes divergence (I encourage every one of you to watch the movie Divergent and all its sequels and prequels) the way a strict headmaster punishes talking in class. Step out of line, think differently, or challenge the textbook, and you get lower marks.

Every single time. By the point where a student has survived 12 years of this, the creativity has been beaten and graded out of them. In the meantime, let's keep wondering why we are importing basic manufactured goods, including toothpicks, and exporting raw materials. It's a complete mystery.

What's even more ironic, we have the nerve to pride ourselves on “old-school discipline,” the canes, the kneeling, the “Sir, please,” as if corporal punishment and teaching by bullying will, somehow, produce overachieving and morally upright citizens.

So far, all we have seen is those same, “well-disciplined” graduates grow up to become the politicians stealing from the state, the contractors building roads that collapse in six months, the officials demanding “something small” before doing their job.

Maybe a system built on fear, compliance and unquestioning obedience doesn't actually produce people with strong internal ethical and moral compasses. Maybe, what it does produce is people who know how to appear disciplined while being the exact opposite and doing whatever they can get away with the moment no one is watching them, and then sauntering off to the nearest church or mosque for absolution by association.

As a product of the same kinds of institutions I am talking about, I am not saying we should burn down every classroom and start again from scratch. As far as I am concerned, the teachers who struggle in overcrowded classrooms on poverty wages are heroes, full stop.

But let's stop pretending that a system that was designed to produce clerks for the British Empire can now somehow be expected to produce creatives and innovators for the 21st century.

The critical and uncomfortable question is that, if our methods of educating young people have not fundamentally changed since independence, why do we expect anything about the country to change? We are literally training our children to be the same kinds of adults who keep running the same kind of country into the same kind of cement block wall … and then we blame the politicians.

As if they didn't all come through the same system, sit through the same lessons, and learn the same lesson: don't think, just reproduce.

At this juncture one might ask, “What's the problem? Chew, pour, pass, forget!”

The old-school methods gave us discipline. Fine. But discipline without critical thinking, without creativity, without ethical grounding—that is not education.

That's just obedience training, the same kind of training I have been giving my wonderful dog, Sheba. And as far as I can see, from my experience with my wonderful Alsatian (German shepherd), obedience has never built anything other than simple compliance, and a healthy appetite for bones.

Source: Kojo Mensah   

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