Development of critical thinking is important in educational training; Domelevo’s year of birth controversy should not wash

When I was pursuing my bachelor’s degree a couple of decades ago, it used to be the case that answers to examination questions required responses spanning pages of answer booklets. There were no multiple choice or short answer questions at that time.

The answers provided the examiners with the opportunity to evaluate the student’s

1) breadth and depth of knowledge in the subject area,

2) organisation of thoughts and logical reasoning,

3) grammar and comprehension,

4) aggregation of knowledge and advancement of cogent arguments in support of proposed answers, etc.

That system of education forced students to read widely, analyse stuff they read carefully, critically examine theories, question the status quo and propose better alternatives, and ultimately develop a more rigorous analytical thinking capacity.

Fast forward, and with the ever-increasing student numbers in our tertiary institutions, the mode of examination has changed dramatically to multiple choice, fill in the gaps, and short answer questions. Of course, it is a system some western nations—especially North America – adopt as well.

It must, however, be highlighted that Ghanaian institutions have not adopted the complete facets of that system of assessment. In North America, a number of student assessments come from lab assignments and critical thinking evaluations.

Critical thinking may involve the analyses of written documents or data from industry, which compels the students to rely on the knowledge acquired from the lectures and labs in order to carefully evaluate the situation. This process culminates in a written report and an oral presentation (examination) to (by) the class.

The above-mentioned approaches to student evaluation lead to, more or less, the same educational outcomes.

Unfortunately, many Ghanaian university lecturers have left out vital computational and (or) map work lab-based training, as well as the very important critical thinking component of educational development. Of course, some lecturers will argue that the student numbers - and other responsibilities - make it impossible to input those components in their syllabi, but others have at least attempted to achieve that goal – albeit modestly – by putting the students in groups.

The consequence of a lapse in critical thinking training is the churning out of graduates who think narrowly and can’t clearly reason logically. They find independent work tedious to perform because they lack the ability and confidence to make sound judgment based on the available resources.

The lack of this important cognitive resource is being taken full advantage of by public officials. This is because we are unable to hold public officials accountable by relying on cogent reasoning. It is a generally accepted fact that many Ghanaians just believe – and in fact wholly – what they hear other people say in the media.

You don’t expect the average educated Ghanaian to, for instance, read a one-page article that should take up to 10 minutes to digest. S/he would rather prefer someone to read and relay the contents to him or her. The same goes for performing simple computations, by oneself, to assess the veracity of numbers that the media, public officials, or politicians bring forth as it relates to contentious national projects.

This lack of ability in critical reasoning is amply demonstrated in these two examples:

The year of birth of Auditor General Daniel Yaw Domelevo

A simple Google search: “what day is 1st June 1961”? The answer pops up as “Thursday”. The middle name of the auditor general (AG) is “Yaw”. The AG, was without doubt, born in 1961 and should be due to retire on the 31st of May, 2021. Any critical thinker will dismiss the SSNIT stuff of this story as inconsequential and a propaganda.

There’s no doubt in my mind that, at a minimum, the chairman of the audit service board knows in his heart that the AG was born in 1961. Let’s not forget, however, that these guys – including the folks at the presidency – are politicians. Politicians don’t care about the truth; hence it is very important that we arm ourselves with appropriate knowledge to combat untruths, misinformation, and propaganda.

It is disturbing to witness, in the media, the unseemly naive propagation and discussion of this untruth since this news broke about the AG’s year of birth. The media, instead of putting a summary closure to this issue, has rather engaged in back and forth arguments and counter arguments regarding the age of the AG.

Interrogation of some few students and recent graduates about their views on this very controversy produced results that raised an eyebrow; some of them couldn’t come to a simple and satisfactory conclusion about the AG’s year of birth.

This was another controversy which raised some worrisome questions. You will be shocked to know that many Ghanaians, to date, believe that the Speaker of Parliament got the post by consensus. This bizarre untruth was perpetuated by the majority leader of parliament, Osei Kyei Mensah Bonsu, after the events in parliament.

The misinformation was amply provided a false leg to stand on by some media people’s lack of training in asking logical questions. It was shocking to see, in an instance, the lack of probing questions from a journalist who interviewed the majority leader regarding the issue. It would be clear to any logical thinker that the majority leader was purely politically minded and peddled untruths.

There were 275 ballots cast. These ballots were sorted for both Bagbin and Oquaye – ballots are sorted based on a visual inspection of which candidate obtained the vote cast on that ballot paper. There was one ballot the clerk and his team placed in the middle of the 2 packs of sorted ballots.

That single ballot was purported to be a rejected (spoilt) ballot. The team then proceeded to count that of Prof Oquaye and obtained 136 votes prior to the snatching of the other pack (Bagbin’s). This result simply translated to 138 votes for Bagbin.

Meanwhile, in the said interview, the majority leader indicated that the counting revealed one spoilt ballot in Prof Oquaye’s pack, suggesting that without counting Bagbin’s, we wouldn’t know how many spoilt ballots were in there as well. That statement was totally untrue and illogical and should have been pointed out by the journalist, but he failed to do that.

The sorters of the ballots were not that stupid to be randomly placing rejected ballots in any pack. What was then the essence of the sorting?

It was however surprising that media houses carried the excerpts of that interview forward in their media discussions.

The political untruth perpetuated by the majority leader got established in the minds of people up to today. This is very unfortunate in the context of independent thinking and decision-making processes of national issues.

With the ever-increasing political machinations and deceit by the two major political parties, it is reasonable to say that Ghana needs a lot more critical thinkers to better interrogate national issues for the betterment of our democracy. Critical thinking must have value in our educational training.