EDUCATION: OPPORTUNITY OF ACCESS FOR INDIVIDUAL AND NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

EDUCATION: OPPORTUNITY OF ACCESS FOR INDIVIDUAL AND NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Dr. Gamel Nasser Adam

Organized societies have always given considerable attention to formal schooling because it is a necessary process of systematically preparing the individual to become a useful and well developed citizen both for his or her personal development and equally importantly, for the overall national development effort. And any country desirous of extricating itself from the crisis of underdevelopment must endeavour to provide the requisite opportunity for all its citizens to develop their potential to the fullest as a precondition for the development of the relevant national mind- and manpower requirements.
Without prejudice to the fundamental disconnect between our educational system and our overall national development aspirations, our main preoccupation for the moment is the lack of opportunity for education and the resultant limitation in social advancement. The connection between opportunity and educational achievement has been well established. So also has been the role of education in either facilitating social mobility or perpetuating social stratification.
It is through education that the son of a goatherd can become an engineer, that the daughter of a cleaner can become a doctor, or the child of a bus driver can become the Vice Chancellor of a university. But for these to happen the child should have the opportunity and access to the type of education that would enable him or her to attain such social mobility. If such opportunity of access is absent or severely limited, this would lead to the perpetuation of social stratification and the further deepening of inequalities.
Over the years some official attention has been given to tackling the problem of especially extreme inequalities in accessing education. An example has been the effort at eliminating the schools-under-trees whose number stood at about 4,300 as at 2008. Significant progress has been made in this area with the construction 2,064 schools consisting of six-unit classrooms and another thousand or so under construction. While it is true that one’s achievement should be measured not so much by the height one has achieved, but more importantly, by the depths from which one has emerged, it is still important to draw attention to the fact that the remainder of the schools under trees is still a significant number and should be tackled with utmost urgency, and even then this should not be an end in itself.
Quite often when the opportunity exists to access education, another critical problem arises in relation to the quality of the educational facilities. A recent news report posted on Ghanaweb recounted the plight of a basic school in Domeabra in Kasoa in the Central Region where classrooms lacked basic furniture to the extent that pupils are compelled to sit on the bare floor during lessons. While this may be an extreme worst case scenario, it pales into insignificance when compared to an anecdotal account about a decade ago of pupils from a basic school in an area in the Northern Region generally referred to as overseas, who turned up at a BECE Examination Centre and were startled at the sight of ordinary classroom paraphernalia the rest of us would easily identify as tables and chairs. Sitting on a chair and behind a desk was not part of their school experience in their remote and isolated localities. The invigilators therefore had to give them a special dispensation to use the method they were more familiar with, and that was lying flat on the floor on their stomachs and writing the examination.
These children were writing the same examination, and answering the same questions as their colleagues in other glamorous schools who, as a matter of course, would have more than the required infrastructure to run the regular academic programmes, and might even have the accoutrement for such exotic extra curricula activities as piano lessons. No wonder therefore that the poorest National Education Assessment scores have routinely gone to schools in rural districts especially of the three Northern Regions. In the overwhelming majority of rural schools, apart from the poor condition of the infrastructure, teachers are mostly untrained and the trained teacher-pupil ratio even in some areas in the Greater Accra Region is often so high that effectively what the teacher does in class is often more of crowd control than actual teaching.
This pattern of inequality is replicated at the higher levels of the education ladder. A 2007 study showed that while the number of Senior High Schools in the country is more than five hundred, enrollment in the University of Ghana and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, for example, was dominated by students from some fifty Senior High Schools located predominantly in the urban areas. This trend has not changed, and the statistics are even more depressing with regard to the study of the sciences where the cost of providing the relevant infrastructure is much higher. And as indicated in an earlier study by Professor Addae-Mensah, former Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, more than 70 percent of those enrolled for the study of medicine, engineering, architecture, pharmacy, the sciences in general, and other professional courses came from just 18 Senior High Schools located in the urban areas.
So every year our Junior and Senior High Schools turn out thousands of youths who, not for lack of ability, are denied the chance of further education and training. These victims make up the numbers of the swarms of teenage hawkers and street vendors who throng the city streets struggling to eke an existence by cleaning car windscreens or selling anything from chocolate to toilet rolls. Under these circumstances, the talent, intelligence and abilities of this army of teenagers are squandered in a scandalous and huge waste of their human learning potential. Among these young teenagers are engineers who will never get the chance to build our roads and bridges, inventors who will never build machines, doctors who will never treat the sick, scholars who will never teach or impart knowledge, or administrators who will never administer business establishments.
A more somber perspective on this worrying development is that not all the victims of this inequality accept the stark contrast in fate. With the proliferation of weapons, the capacity of these victims to take matters into their own hands and inflict indiscriminate damage becomes frighteningly real. The knee-jerk reaction has often been to beef up police budgets to fight crime especially armed robbery. On their part, individuals with the requisite capacity continually reinforce and update their residential security. This is not to sound cynical. Of course crime is bad, and the associated antisocial conduct must be condemned and dealt with using the full rigours of the law. But one of the most effective ways of reducing crime and waywardness is to provide the opportunity and access to good quality education for all citizens. In this way the number of potential candidates lined up to take their turns in our prisons will be drastically reduced. More importantly, the latent national learning capacity will also be greatly increased. Any government commitment directed at this effort will have the support of stakeholders such as Baraka Policy Institute.

*The writer is a Snr. Lecturer, University of Ghana and Board Member of Baraka Policy Institute (BPI)
Published in the Daily Graphic on Monday, December 8, 2014