Ghana's rote-driven education backward – Awuah

Ghana’s educational system has over the years placed much premium on the system of memorisation by repetition and has become an impediment for people to be forward-looking, Dr Patrick Awuah, founder and president of Ashesi University, has said.

According to him, when teaching and learning are based on rote learning, it only trains people to look back at what somebody else has discovered instead of thinking to discover things for themselves.

Speaking on the Ghana Report programme on Viasat 1 on Monday September 12, Dr Awuah said: “I think Ghana’s educational system is too much deep in rote learning – chew, pour, pass, and forget – and this cuts across, and this is a problem because if your education is always about memorising facts, it is not educating people to be forward-looking; it is educating people to always be looking back at what somebody else has discovered.”

“This is a fundamental problem,” Dr Awuah told host Bernard Avle.

He added: “The second problem is there is not enough emphasis placed on ethics and so you get people in incredibly influential positions who are behaving in unethical ways and it is extremely costly to society when they do that. So these are the problems.”

Touching on the free senior high school policy debate, he said: “I think that the most important thing is to make sure that we have teachers who are dedicated, who deeply care about their students, and that we have teachers who are not overburdened and who have the tools they need to get the job done. We also need great management in all the schools…”