By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Nov. 2, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
I had intended to only briefly comment on the Ghana Education Service's survey of second-grade pupils that found 98-percent of these six- and seven-year-olds unable to read and understand the English language in my article captioned "In-Service Sacked Pupil Teachers," but was unable to do so because it dealt with an aspect of the country's educational system that would have taken me off-tangent (See "Re-Deploy Sacked Teachers - 2014 National Best Teacher" Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 10/6/14).
The timing of the survey especially piqued my interest, because it pointedly highlighted the fact that those charged with administering our public school system may not be professionally up to snuff, as it were. Here in New York State, for example, both public and parochial, as well as private, school pupils are first comprehensively tested in the third grade in both reading and math skills. Most parents and teachers are aware of this fact, and parents are strongly advised to read to their children at least twenty to thirty minutes every day. I am not aware that any such advisory preceded the decision of the Ghana Education Service (GES) to have second graders tested.
And also, whether such testing included math or the logical reasoning skills of these pupils. What I am also curious to know, since I also have a second-grade son, and another in the fourth grade, is whether the acute shortage and disparities in the accessibility of learning and teaching materials throughout the country were also taken into account. As well, was any account taken of the fact that to most Ghanaian pupils, the English language, both spoken and written, comes as a second language. Likewise, account ought to be taken of the fact that the overwhelming majority of the teachers of these pupils themselves speak English as a second or even a third language.
It is also a widely known fact that a remarkable percentage of these teachers themselves are barely articulate in the English langage. Indeed, while I was growing up, the routine was for elementary pupils to be instructed in their native tongues, for the most part, during the first three years of their schooling. This does not in anyway imply that instruction, or pedagogy, at this seminal level was wholly devoid of the English language. English was taught as one of the major courses, namely, math, history, geography and writing (or composition). By the fourth grade, when most of the pupils were nine or ten years old and were beginning to take serious cognizance of their environment and the world at large, then was it deemed to be timely and appropriate to begin instructing these pupils in the national language of governance and business, or commerce.
What I am trying to argue here is that it would have been more meaningful for the class-two pupils to have been tested in their native tongues, or the dominant languages of their communities and districts. And then a year or two later, they could then have been meaningfully tested in the country's official English language. Under present circumstance, the Ghana Education Service merely ended up wasting everybody's time and the precious material resources of the Ghanaian taxpayer. And I bet the overwhelming majority of the 2-percent of the second graders who aced the English reading and comprehension test were the children of the wealthy and the urban resident.
I don't know, maybe Prof. Jane Naana Opoku-Agyeman, Ghana's Minister of Education and former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast, can tell us something worthwhile about this rather curious decision to nationally test our second graders.
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