Ghana’s great potential for socio-economic development has never been in doubt, but the country seems to be stuck in first gear, raising a lot of noise and not making optimum use of that great potential. One area where this is most manifest is the education sector where limitation of access and opportunity deprive many citizens of the chance for full self-development as a prerequisite for overall national development. And this is happening despite for the best efforts of governments and other relevant stakeholders over the years and decades.

Much has been said about the fundamental disconnect between our educational system and our overall national development aspirations. Discussion of this topic will be reserved for another occasion. For the moment, the main preoccupation is with the lack of opportunity for education and the social*** educational achievement has been well established. So also has the role of education in either facilitation social mobility or perpetuating social stratification.

Indeed, it is through education that the son of a goatherd can become a doctor or an engineer that the daughter of a cleaner can become a lawyer 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 is severely limited, this would lead to the perpetuation of social stratification and further deepening of inequalities.

Inequalities in accessing education

 Over the years, some official attention has been given to tackling the problem of extreme inequalities in accessing education. An example has been the effort at eliminating schools-under-trees whose number, until lately, stood at about 4, 3000. The recent construction of 2,064 schools consisting of six-unite classrooms and another 1,000 or so still under construction, represent a significant leap forward. While it is true that one’s achievement should be measured not so mach by the height one has achieved, but more important, by the depths from which one has emerged, it is still important to draw attention to the fact that the remainder of the school under trees is still a significant number and should be tackled with utmost urgency.

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 at DOMEABRA IN Kasoa in the Central Region where classrooms lacked basic furniture to the extent that pupils were compelled to sit on the 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 the area in the Northern Region generally referred to as overseas, who turned up at a Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) center almost completely disoriented at the sight of that 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 rural communities. The invigilators, therefore, had to grant them special dispensation to use the method they were more familiar with, and that was lying flat on the floor on their stomachs and writing.

These children were writing the same examination, and answering the same extra curricula activity as piano lesions. No wonder, therefore, 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 o infrastructure, teachers are mostly untrained and the teacher-pupil ratio even in some areas in the Greater Accra Region is often so high that effectively what the teacher does is more of crowd control and less of actual teaching.

Replication of inequality pattern

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 (SHS) in the country is more than 500, enrolment in the University of Ghana and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, for example, is dominated by students

 From some 5o SHSs located predominantly in urban areas. The statistics are even more depressing with regard to the sciences where the

By Gamel Naser Adam