The Rod We Removed, The Void We Never Filled

Ghana banned corporal punishment in schools in 2017 and promised a better system in its place. Nine years on, rising indiscipline suggests the promise was never funded, staffed, or enforced — and the cost is landing on the very generation meant to become the country's next responsible leaders.

Ghana did not lose discipline in its secondary schools by accident. It lost it in 2017, the year the Ghana Education Service banned corporal punishment and instructed every pre-tertiary school to adopt a Positive Discipline Toolkit in its place. The intention was sound. The execution was not. Nine years on, the debate that keeps surfacing in our newsrooms and our staff common rooms — should we bring back the cane? — is the wrong debate. The real question is simpler and far more uncomfortable: did we ever actually build the system we promised to replace it with?

The evidence suggests we did not. GES data points to a sharp rise in student disciplinary infractions in recent years. A field assessment by the National Commission for Civic Education found that a large share of senior high students have witnessed or survived physical bullying on their own campuses. And barely weeks ago, the Education Minister told Parliament that senior high students are selling weed on school compounds, directing GES to dismiss offenders. These are not isolated headlines. They are symptoms of a school system that removed its only known deterrent and never finished building the one meant to take its place.

A ban without a backbone

To be fair to the policy's architects, the case for ending corporal punishment was never frivolous. Ghana ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990, an instrument that unambiguously prohibits cruel and degrading treatment of children. The Positive Discipline Toolkit that followed the ban was built on real evidence: internationally, restorative justice practices have been shown to cut suspensions and disciplinary referrals significantly, and socio-emotional learning programmes have improved classroom behaviour in the countries that invested in them properly. Where Ghanaian teachers have actually been trained in these methods and given the staffing to implement them — positive reinforcement, restorative conversations, structured behavioural support — schools report real reductions in disciplinary incidents. The model is not the flaw.

The flaw is what happened after the directive was signed. Studies of how the policy has actually played out in our basic and secondary schools tell a consistent story: teachers were handed a manual, not a system. Many report that alternative methods demand far more supervision than a classroom teacher juggling forty or fifty students can realistically give, and that this added burden eats directly into instructional time. Many say the alternatives feel culturally disconnected from how discipline has always worked in Ghanaian homes and classrooms, so — quietly, unofficially, unaccountably — some teachers simply keep doing what they were told to stop doing, just now without any of the structure, oversight, or proportionality that used to govern it. That is the real danger hiding inside this story. The ban did not end corporal punishment in Ghana. It ended regulated corporal punishment and replaced it with an inconsistent, half-enforced patchwork where nobody — not the teacher, not the student, not the parent — is entirely sure what the rules actually are anymore.

Why this is bigger than the classroom

It would be a mistake to treat this as merely a schools problem. Every minister, judge, police officer, and company director this country will have twenty years from now is sitting in a classroom today, absorbing a lesson that has nothing to do with the syllabus: that boundaries are negotiable, that consequences are inconsistent, and that authority can be tested indefinitely without cost. A nation that is serious about "building responsible future leaders" — a phrase we repeat at every graduation and every education ministry press briefing — cannot simultaneously run a discipline system that teaches the opposite lesson every single school day. Character is not formed in a civics textbook. It is formed in the thousand small moments where a school either holds a line or doesn't. Right now, too many of our schools cannot hold that line, not because teachers have stopped caring, but because the state removed their tools without giving them new ones that actually work.

Neither nostalgia nor abdication

The honest position here refuses two easy exits. It is not "bring back the cane" — that argument mistakes a symptom for a solution and ignores the real, documented harm corporal punishment caused for decades. But it is also not acceptable to leave the current arrangement as it is, where the ban exists on paper while informal punishment persists in practice and neither the rights-based promise nor the disciplinary function of school is actually being delivered.

What Ghana needs is a Code of Conduct with legal teeth — not a toolkit, a binding framework with graduated, enforceable sanctions that give head-teachers real authority and legal protection when they act within it. It needs actual investment: trained counsellors and pastoral staff in schools that currently have none, and proper professional development for teachers instead of a directive followed by silence. It needs regional and district education directorates empowered to approve intermediate sanctions without every case crawling through Accra's bureaucracy. And it needs parents brought back into the loop as co-owners of school discipline, not bystanders who hear about a suspension after the fact.

None of this requires reopening the corporal punishment debate. It requires admitting that Ghana passed a good policy and then failed, for nearly a decade, to fund, train, and structure it into something that actually functions. That failure — not the ban itself — is what is quietly compromising the character formation of the very generation we are counting on to run this country responsibly. We do not have a discipline philosophy problem. We have a discipline delivery problem. And every year we delay fixing it, we are not sparing a child a beating — we are sending another cohort of young Ghanaians into adulthood having learned that authority in this country does not mean very much.

Rexford Adjei Darko
Public Relations Practitioner, Governance & AI Advocate and CSR Researcher

Email: rexfordgh1@yahoo.com
Tel: +233 244 769 456 | +66 065 973 3550

   Comments0