Handing over schools to missions, service or disservice?

Government’s recent decision to hand over schools that were built and administered by missions has come as a surprise. In as much as I would personally accept the proposition as a staunch trained Presbyterian, I still cannot deduce the positive impact this action will have on our educational system to propel national growth.

The question on my mind is what government wants to achieve with this handover policy. Does government, with surreptitious manoeuvre, want to escape its obligation in managing these schools adequately juxtaposing its free education policy enshrined it its manifesto? Or, are our schools being privatised as part of government’s Private Public Partnership (PPP) arrangement?

In my view, this handover will not bring any transformation into our educational system. It is like removing the soup from the pot into the African kettle; they are both black. Even when the schools were being managed by government, the missions still had supreme control over the day-to-day running of them. The practice of the various religious norms and rituals being observed in these schools is testimony. Therefore, the official handover makes no difference.

This decision will rather bring great divisiveness and will give preferential treatment to the various religious groups to rebuff otherwise very clever students, who might have qualified, admission based on religious affiliation. It will also bring unwarranted financial burden on students and parents as the churches would want to levy them to be able to sustain the running of these schools appropriately. This will erode government’s policy of giving equal, free and accessible universal education to all Ghanaian children and rather enhance the promotion of inequality and caste system in the country’s educational revolution.

Religiosity and spiritualism

Our backwardness in educational development can be laid on our mindset in assuming that religiosity and spiritualism could help us achieve our goals, leading us to indulge in unnecessary worshipping and praying most of the time; forgetting our mandate to work hard with patriotism to develop, a situation basically implanted on our psyche by the missions.

This new development will help sink more the educational motives in our children to our detriment. The dogmatic religious practices that were imbedded in us by the colonial masters through this mission school system will be deepened further in creating religiously dogmatic scholars that are unhealthy to our national growth.
On another hand, if government’s temperament is to infuse discipline in our new generation of scholars through the mission schools, then I am afraid it is misplaced.
Discipline is a product of civic education that teaches hygiene, good manners and respect for the elderly; attributes that are lacking in schools, for which we are paying dearly.

In addition, that aspect of civic education that says, “Do unto others as you want them to do unto you,” a doctrine propounded by an Indian philosopher that had been adopted by the religious groups, is a moral pusher.

To demonstrate how doctrinaire religious behaviour has affected our national growth, our own President Nana Akufo-Addo in addressing workers during the May Day celebration admonished them to stop praying at offices and devote time for hard work to augment productivity and consequently uplift their remuneration that will eventually bring them happiness.

The acting President of Nigeria, Prof. Osibanjo, when addressing public workers in Abuja, replicated this declaration. “Stop praying and start working,” as Nigeria faces an economic malaise, the country’s Vice-President has this clear message for civil servants. Yemi Osinbajo, a Christian pastor himself, in an address to civil servants in the capital Abuja, urged Nigeria’s public workforce to rely on their own efforts, and not their spiritual supplications, to improve the state of the country. He continued, “Great economies and great nations, prosperity and abundance of nations and communities are created by men and not spirits.” These assertions have demonstrated that students who are our future workers will be sunk asymmetrically towards economic growth by relying on religiosity and spiritualism for solutions if the missions are handed the schools.

Setbacks

Lackadaisical performance in our schools hinges on lack of decent budgetary allocation, inadequate supervision/inspection, unseriousness and disrespect for teachers and education in general in the country.

Boarding schools that were hitherto the brain behind moulding good characters by instilling utmost discipline suffered setbacks because we lack the resources to sustain them but spend frivolously on peripherals. This behaviour has generated the shift system in our schools that paved the way for pupils’ truancy because we cannot afford to build the needed schools for our future leaders.

Decades back, secondary schools and teacher training colleges were clearly dichotomised. Since secondary education was quite expensive, intelligent students whose parents could not afford them opted for the teacher training system that was free with monthly allowances.

These intelligent students ended up teaching pupils in the basic schools as mandatory policy and implanted their astuteness in mathematics on the pupils that produced several clever kids in mathematics, a subject hitherto found to be invisible.

The current system of postsecondary teachers has produced mediocre teachers, especially in mathematics and the sciences, subjects that ignite logical reasoning that is essential to our developmental process. Once the basic mathematical knowledge is lagging behind, there would be no solution for our backwardness.

There are IQ differences between our kids and those from the advanced countries due to the genes that created them; therefore, we must endeavour to evolve our own pedagogies and not copy foreign ones blindly.

Academic load must be lowered to enable pupils to concentrate and grapple well with selected subjects to avert cheating in examinations because pupils who are uncertain and cannot cope with huge volume of work will definitely resort to cheating. Too much load can lead the kids to mental fatigue and, therefore, dull kids. I do not envisage the missions can command a magic wand in transforming our educational institutions. After all, they were in charge when government took over, as it is the same personnel that will be in control in the long run.