What Is Quality Education?

I have been provoked to put my thoughts in the public domain by my respected younger colleague Professor Jerome Djangmah.

I could of course use the less emotive term “prompted” instead of “provoked”; but, since the initial impetus to write was in response to some remarks reported (in the Ghanaian Times of October 20, 2011, page 14) to have been made by Professor Djangmah at the 125th anniversary of the Accra Asempe Primary School, I retain the word “provoked,” knowing full well that in our common pursuit of quality education for the children and youth of Ghana, as senior citizens, we should prompt one another to make available the lessons we have learnt from our past experiences in nation building.

In his speech at the 125th anniversary of the Accra Asempe Primary School, Jerome is reported to have called the interventions such as capitation grants, school feeding and free school uniforms, made by politicians of all stripes, as “hypocritical”.

I suspect that the more accurate word would be populist.

But knowing that capitation grants and school feeding programmes arose in the context of our dear country’s HIPC state nearly a decade ago, and recalling that former President Kufuor’s residence in West Airport has earned the name “HIPC Corner” from the Ghanaian’s irrepressible sense of humour, I was unhappy with Jerome’s use of the word “hypocritical” to describe these interventions.

I must add that in the subsequent column for the Ghanaian Times of October 27, 2011, he himself acknowledged that he probably went too far and gave some of his readers the impression that his “nerves sometimes touch at the wrong places”.

The fact is that these interventions, properly targeted, are part of the package of measures required in our pursuit of quality education as an imperative of our touted democratic dispensation.

Quality education at the basic level, is very much at the core of Professor Djangmah’s advocacy both on public platforms and in his bi-weekly columns for the Ghanaian Times during the past 18 months or so.

It has been very much in the news recently as a result of the appalling performance in last year’s BECE examinations by a number of mainly rural schools.

At the time of writing this piece, the Ghanaian Times of Tuesday, January 24, carried a front page report of “irate youth assaulting the head teacher of a school in the Dangme West District, protesting against the perennial poor performance of the pupils at BECE.”

In popular perception, therefore, quality education, at the basic level, should ensure that pupils pass their examinations well enough to qualify for admission to the next level of the educational ladder; alternatively, it should provide them with knowledge and skills that make it possible for them to secure employment in a competitive global market.

With even this limited and pragmatic conception of quality education, one realises that a complex and varied number of conditions are required.

The poor head teacher who was assaulted at Duffuor in the Dangme West District pointed out that most of the school’s pupils “fend for themselves and as such, did not have enough time for their books”.

In my next piece, I shall attempt to itemise some of these conditions and suggest the interventions required from government, parents, teachers, researchers and policymakers.

As for the poor performance of the public basic schools at the BECE, it is obvious to those who have given any thought to the problem that the fundamental solution lies in ensuring that pupils acquire the ability to read and write and compute, as quickly as possible, during the first five years of schooling.

This requires a new training of our teachers, and a new approach to teaching or pedagogy.

Fortunately, a beginning has been made by the Ghana Education Service’s launching of the programme called the National Literacy and Numeracy Acceleration Programme, NALAP for short from February 2010.

The impact of this programme is unlikely to be felt before the end of a decade.

In any case, as another younger colleague has pointedly remarked, it is not what you expect, but what you inspect, that shows results. What is the nature of the inspection required to turn around the deterioration of quality education in our country?