By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
April 26, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
The notion, being pushed by IMANI-Ghana's Mr. Franklin Cudjoe, that, somehow, the best way to advance the quality of the nation's educational system is to restore teacher-trainee allowances for science and mathematics trainees, while denying the same privilege or incentives to trainees in the arts, the humanities and the social sciences will not work (See "Pay Only Math And Science Teacher-Trainees - Cudjoe" Citifmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/26/15). And here, of course, I am not merely implying the likely fallout of protestations by teacher-trainees unjustly denied the same incentive. Rather, I am referring to the fact that it takes a functionally organic combination of both the sciences and the arts to build and develop a sound and worthwhile educational system.
To be certain, science education in Ghana has not been as effective as it could be because the reading and critical-thinking skills of our students generally leave much to be desired. Personally, I was privileged to have attended Okwawu-Nkwatia's St. Peter's Secondary School in the mid-1970's to early 1980s, and to have had the German-born physicist Father Josef Glatzel as my headmaster. It was Father Glatzel who taught Archbishop Palmer-Buckle, of the Greater-Accra Archdiocese, at Pope John's Secondary School, Koforidua, the decade before I enrolled at PERSCO, as St. Peter's was affectionately called and popularly known. The philosophy of Father Glatzel, and one that most of our educational policymakers would be well-off to adopt, was to envisage the sciences and the arts as complementing one another.
In other words, the well-rounded educated person was the one who was really educated in the traditional sense of the term. For instance, an electrical engineer employed at Akosombo's Volta River Authority (VRA) who knows absolutely nothing about the geography and geological and cultural history of Akosombo and its environs and the general history of the nation at large, cannot be very effective on the job. And this understanding ought to become the curricular baseline or fundamental knowledge base of all electrical engineering trainees in the country. He may have served as an elementary schoolteacher of Arithmetic or even Algebra and Trignometry at some early point in his life, but however good he might have been, this parochial and basic experience does not make the cross-dressing Mr. Johnson Asiedu-Nketia any remarkable authority in the discipline of education and pedagogy.
Besides, the issue at stake here is one for actively engaged public-policymakers and not the General-Secretary of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC). The ruling party and the central government are two separate entities. If Mr. Asiedu-Nketia wants his views to carry weight with educational policymakers, let him publish them in an academic and/or professional journal and stop childishly exchanging words with teacher-trainees who are mostly young enough to be his own children and even grandchildren.
At St. Peter's, what Father Glatzel did to boost the quality of both science and arts education was to build and equip our science labs with state-of-the-art equipment. Indeed, so ultra-modern were PERSCO's science labs that graduates in attendance at the extant three flagship academies in the country, namely, the University of Ghana, Cape Coast and Science and Technology were routinely seen conducting experiments on the awe-inspiring campus of St. Peter's. Legend even had it that a very busy Father Glatzel often attended the National Conference of Heads of Government-Assisted Secondary Schools (CHASS) largely to brag about the cutting-edge status of PERSCO's science labs. No wonder between 1976 and 1981, when I attended St. Peter's, we were easily the best secondary school in Ghana for most of those years.
In some years, nearly half of all entrants into the Ghana Medical School were "A"-Level gradates of St. Peter's. And just how did Father Glatzel almost singularly achieve this feat? Quite simple: He did so by ensuring that PERSCO, in addition to sporting the best-equipped science labs in the country, would also boast of the best-stocked liberal arts library in the country.
Cutting off teacher-trainees' allowances does not serve any meaningful purpose, other than massaging the egos of a few rascals in government who are eager to flex their proverbial muscles by "showing" these teacher-trainees "where real power lies." Let's get this point promptly and straight across: Cutting off the allowances of teacher-trainees has not caused any exponential increment in funding for these tertiary academies. All it has achieved is release more wasteful-spending money for government officials and their wives, mistresses and concubines. My good friend, Mr. Sydney Casely-Hayford put the Mahama government's abject hypocrisy on the front-burner when "he questioned why the government cannot continue with the payment of allowances in place as well as allow teacher-training colleges to admit more students if, indeed, it believes that [a good] education is the bedrock of every nation."
Touche, Sydney, my brother!
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