The Girl Child Education And The Visible Women Role Models Of Society

By Stanley Seshie

Do you have a daughter? Has the Ghanaian society offered her enough

visible role models from which she could select? Do you not think the

society is systematically telling her all roads lead to the paparazzi

world entertainment and politics? That it is like being on an island

coming from the cold: the sciences, engineering, mathematics and

technological innovations. Imagine your daughter and her mates

listening to the first Ghanaian female Afronault (An African

astronault) recounting firsthand experience of visiting space. As

other group of women, taking their stand one after another telling

them what it takes to launch space shuttle successfully from the

ground and monitor it to its destination. How the Ghana Observatory

Complex located in the plains of Akosombo near Volta Region is full of

female scientists, engineers and mathematicians engaged in not just

studying the heavens but also developing technologies that are equally

of use here in Ghana and the world at large. Surely, many shall be

inspired to follow their steps and even dream of doing better than

them in areas where society insisted is difficult for women.

Nations have liberated their women, and successfully created the

necessary environment for them to express their inherent intellectual

and emotional capability in politics, philosophy, economics,

mathematics, engineering, arts and sciences. The result is the

impressive development for their nations. Ghana is certainly on

course, doing that across the spectrum of human endeavor. However, it

seems the entire emancipatory machinery towards women is almost all

about leading them into politics and entertainment. As if no option

practically lies beyond these two for the freed and determined woman.

In Ghana, we have fossilized the impression that only those in the

paparazzi world of politics and entertainment industries influence

society. Intransigently woven into our societal consciousness are

conversations that bother on personalities (not even ideas) in

religion, politics as well as entertainment industries than the

mathematics, sciences and engineering. That means our growing

daughters have only women in these avenues to look up to as role

models. The obscuration of the available few in the sciences,

engineering, technological innovations by their counterparts from the

paparazzi landscape dovetailed into the perception.

The result is there are few women to serve as role models in the

sciences and co for our daughters. We all know where to find the

teeming majority of the women. The increasingly disabling environment

of Ghana ensured that the oceanic dungeons of religion naturally

swallowed them up. Yes, they are in the places of worships and

mountaintops solving all the alleged spiritual problems of their

husbands, children, homes, community and nation at large via the

fervency and efficacy of prayer and faith. For a reward, they are seen

as the best role models. You know, a good woman is the praying one.

Else she is but an arrogant if not an outright bad one. Our Ghanaian

society is yet to come to terms with embracing educated women who can

see through the instituted shackles of suppression.

Dr. Aggrey once told us that, for rapid development we need the

educated woman to prosecute the agenda. More than ever in any

generation, our growing daughters need these educated women to emulate

as role models from every intellectual avenue. So doing little in the

comprehensive liberation effort, we are starving our daughters. The

repercussions are their minimal contribution towards national

development. It is time to revamp and oil the emacipatory machinery.

This means the affirmative action groups must cast their net beyond

just fitting them into the paparazzi kitchens.

In addition, whilst we forever hold in high esteem the multitudes of

our hardworking women collectively called "market women", they can no

longer be role models to our daughtets as was the case in the past. A

continuation of that is acceptance and endorsement of national

mediocrity. Notwithstanding the indisputable importance of

agriculture, the world is increasingly moving away from tilling the

ground to mining the mind. The mining avenues of the human mind for

the benefit of a nation are the arts, mathematics and sciences. This

is why you must be worried that we are focussing on only the arts

(religion, politics and entertainment) and neglecting and forgetting

the rest to our own detriments. They have had enough of the musicians,

journalists, politicians and prayer warriors saturating and dominating

the society for far too long as the only visible role models.

The sky is no longer the limit for humanity for the paparazzi world to

be our daughters' limit. We do not even know if there is a limit at

all. Our daughters must be encouraged to join the open inexhautible

explorative kitchens of the sciences, mathematics, engineering and

technological innovations in addition to the arts to prepare their

intellectual meal for our national consumption and development. That

means we have need women from those areas to also make themselves

visible. In addition to the numerous female groups focussing on the

paparazzi world, we also need a group like Ghana Association of Women

Engineers, Mathematicians and Scientists (GAWEMS) to prosecute and

disseminate the urgent message of seeding and harvesting these crops

of daughters for the nation. We need them.

Email: seshiehanku@gmail.com

Whatsapp: 0508951323