Let's save education system

There is a general feeling that things are not well with our education sector. Some people are of the view that the problem started several years ago, when the Common Entrance Examination which selects candidates for the various secondary schools was abolished in the 1980s. That system had a lot of advantages. First, it guaranteed entry into the second cycle schools and ultimately, entry into the tertiary institutions. Second, it gave room for very little redundancy. In effect, it afforded every pupil an opportunity to find his or her own level in the academic system since those who could not ultimately make to the secondary schools or teacher training colleges either because of poor performance or inadequate financial resources still managed to fix themselves somehow in the vocational schools. The junior secondary school concept, which was introduced in the 1980s to replace the old system, we were told, was to be practical-based so that even at that level pupils who could not go further could fit into the system, employment-wise. The idea on paper was good, but in reality was poorly implemented. Some of the tools purchased for the workshops remained rusty in their boxes, while most of the workshops were never built. The new system also brought its problems which we are still grappling with. Top on the list is overcrowding. Because in the past admission into secondary was graduated over a period of five years, the schools were able to cope with the number of candidates applying for admission. Things changed when all the pupils began struggling for admission at the end of the junior secondary school level. Meanwhile no provision was made for such a huge number of prospective students vying for admission into the senior secondary schools. The problem has remained with us since and spread to the tertiary institutions. Apart from overcrowding and the pressure brought on the schools, other problems have been identified. They include poor and inadequate school infrastructure, paucity of learning materials and disgruntled human resource in the form of teachers who feel ill-motivated. Several governmental interventions aimed at solving the problems and restoring high standards of education seemed not to be working. An attempt by the Kufuor Administration as part of the solution was the extension of the senior secondary school to four years and the change of name to ‘senior high school’. That, of course, did not address the fundamental issues of inadequate classrooms, laboratories, dormitories, learning and teaching materials and the concerns of teachers such as accommodation, transportation and higher wages. The Mills Administration saw an escape valve here by restoring the three-year senior secondary regime with the justifiable argument that the number of years spent at that level is relatively secondary and what matters most is the facilities. Meanwhile our results are not encouraging and the pressure on the tertiary institutions is not decreasing. To escape this anomaly, the government has taken a decision to encourage private tertiary institutions, some of which have the accreditation to award degrees. That is where another danger lies. Very soon we will have hordes of people dangling university certificates in our faces but who actually do not pass for senior high school graduates. Some of the private universities are circumventing the regulations instituted by the National Council of Tertiary Education (NCTE) on the admission and standards of the universities. Early this year, the National Accreditation Board (NAB) had to step in to withdraw the admission of 695 students of the Central University College because they failed to meet the minimum admission requirements. Before we could recover from this scandal, the NAB again had to intervene to withdraw the admission of 1,465 students of the Methodist University College of Ghana for the same reasons. We do not know what to expect if the NAB should do a thorough audit of the admissions of the various private universities mushrooming all over the place. Some parents or students have themselves blame for not doing due diligence before accepting offers of admissions. But the onus lies on the schools to operate within the rules. There is this lame argument that some students who perform poorly at lower levels recover sufficiently enough to do better at higher levels. That is true, just as it is true that some people perform very well at lower levels but poorly at higher levels. But do we leave the field open without any measure of standards? Surely the world cannot be left open in that standard-less manner. Ours is a young country trying to come out of underdevelopment. We can only do so with a strong human resource base. That means standards must not be compromised for numbers. It is unfortunate that we are shifting focus from science and technology and putting emphasis on the liberal arts. Even our own once-revered Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, which as the name suggests is supposed to be our equivalent of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is rivaling other universities in the admission of candidates for the liberal arts and social sciences. India, Korea, Brazil, Pakistan, Iran and many others are on beat launching satellites and designing the latest models of automobiles. These things do not come by chance. It takes conscious national development agenda to make things happen. This is why the NCTE and NAB must not relent in their mandate and ensure that the breach of their regulations does not become the norm. Schools that have flagrantly flouted the law should be sanctioned severely before they flood the system with people who will come and worsen an already bad situation. fokofi@yahoo.co.uk kofiakordor.blogspot.com