Education and politics

Recent news from WAEC has indicated that only 28% of students who sat for the 2014 edition of the WASSCE have qualified for tertiary education. Now we are not too sure whether to cry because the remaining 72% can not access tertiary education or whether to jubilate because that performance is actually the second best in 10 years. Well the issue is that, almost everyone is quick to blame students for not preparing well enough for the examinations. However, a thorough and honest investigation for the root causes of this abysmal performance is likely to reveal that the problem is more of political than most of us may think.

First of all, the country invests so much time and resources into entertainment to the detriment of education. While parents complain about the covert and overt cost of education, government of Ghana is able to budget about GHC 20m into sporting activities that would not yield relatively much benefit to the country. A report from myjoyonline.com indicated that, every member of the management board of Ghana Black Stars team collected US$ 82,000.00 each during the recent ended 2014 FIFA world cup! Yet, government claims there is no money to finance school feeding, pay teachers, and expand hard educational infrastructure.

We live in a country were an entertainer is paid US$1 million for smoking weed on stage. Rappers win awards for singing intellectually bankrupt songs like "ole s3k3 ni w) ye", which literally means "do you know how crazy and confused I am". Meanwhile, the child looks at his teacher who is usually woefully de-motivated and will typically take a live time to earn a million dollars. The child asks himself why should he listen to his teachers when he can make so much money without his teacher's education. The point is that until we make education lucrative enough for students themselves to know its worth, we will continue to get more than half of WASSCE candidates not qualifying for the tertiary institutions and probably continue to say that the results are "not that bad".

Secondly, the poor geographical distribution of schools has also contributed to the recent abysmal performance of students in the WASSCE. Schools that are located close to cities and smaller towns are likely to attract more competent teachers than schools located far away from cities. Due to the conditions prevailing in rural areas, teachers do not accept postings to those areas but always prefer to be in the urban areas. It is, therefore, not surprising that the majority of students who fail miserably come from rural areas.

Despite the almost crippled nature that our educational system may seem, all is not doomed to failure yet as there exists for us just a chance to salvage the pieces to prevent further damages. First, we as a people must prioritize education more than entertainment and other activities of relatively less important returns. This will mean we must be willing to invest more into education and pronounce it as the sole medicine for success. Secondly, governments must be willing to redistribute development so that rural areas will not be heavily deprived of infrastructure to attract teachers into the communities.

By: Kwasi Paul and Mensah Emmanuel, KNUST.