Work and happiness : Productive memories from Class One
The following “joke” made the rounds on WhatsApp recently. (Kofi on his sick bed in the hospital called for his wife and four children.)
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Kofi: To you, my wife, take over the petroleum company in the capital. (The wife cried loudly).
Kofi: To you, my first son, take over the mall in the south. (The first son cried loudly).
Kofi: To you, my second son, take over the gas station close to the airport. (The second son cried louder)
Kofi: To my third son, take over the airport. (The third son cried louder too).
Kofi: To you, my only daughter, the High School is yours. (The daughter cried the loudest.)
Nurse (confused): I don’t understand why you people are still crying. Your dad has left you a great deal of properties. You should all be fine.
Wife: Properties? He’s a Zoomlion worker. Those are the places he cleans every day.
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The sender attached the following note: “Don’t laugh alone, let others laugh too”; so I sent the “joke” to a Ghanaian friend in the United States for him to “laugh too”. This is the reply he sent back:
“You know, business contracts are properties! So this “joke” is only funny where that concept is alien! And sanitation work is honourable work, if it helped to support a wife and four children. The fact that this joke is going around in Ghana on WhatsApp is indicative of our cluelessness when it comes to hard work, business ethos, and earning a living from honest work. In a country with mass unemployment one shouldn’t cry when given the opportunity to inherit a job, however lowly …”
One main thing I remember from Class One, as pioneers in our one room village school at Tutuka, Obuasi (called St John’s Primary School at the time) was the work ethic. Now called George Padmore’s Primary, the school’s culture of maintenance and the cleanliness was our responsibility as pupils. And to think we were little children – between the ages of six and eight.
This new village school was built about two years before Ghana’s independence in 1957 by the labour and material contributions from people in the community. Though a small one room edifice sitting on a small piece of land, the nature of its very genesis generated pride and joy in the area. We all had emotional investments in the school: the village folks aimed to educate their wards and the children aimed to read, write and add numbers.
Looking back, we were a cohort of about 30 pupils, packaged into four neat “battalions”: Red Section; Gold Section; Blue Section, and Green Section – each with prescribed duties as assigned.
Besides the regular class work, our key responsibility — defined as a school project — was to wall the school against the intrusions of the maurading village goats, notorious as no respecters of boundaries. The building of the great wall entailed weekend excursions into the bushes with cutlasses to cut bamboo trees.
When the bamboo wall was finally built, with all the middle passages bound and secured with ropes and nails, the next project was to gather the seeds of milk bushes to nurse into seedlings which we grew as hedges to green the school compound as an “Oasis of Excellence”. When the first flowers started blooming, opening out like dainty soothing yellow bells, we were overjoyed. We didn’t know photosynthesis or root systems from Adam, but the labour of planting for beauty and aesthetics paid off handsomely.
Fundraising
In between, we also had to raise some cash for chalk and other supplies for teaching and learning. This fundraising project was done after school, where we toured the backyards of the compound houses asking to collect the palm kernels dumped after the fibres from the palm fruits had been boiled and pounded and the liquid extracted for palm soup.
We cracked the kernels with stones to release the nuts. For containers, we fetched empty milk cans and other tins which we ground on stony grounds till the tops fell off; the cans then served as cups. This was a weekly project, so at every Monday morning assembly the sections were called in order, one after the other, where visible to the teachers and all, we poured the contents into larger bins which were then sold to some market women who in turn converted them into palm kernel oil for sale in the market.
All these projects were done in class one; there was no class two yet. We were to advance into class two, the next year, when the room attached – now being built, was completed.
Some kind Samaritan carpenter had donated a wooden bench which we had settled under a tree. When the classroom was closed after hours and on weekends, that bench served as our veritable abode for homework. The only book I remember having was a Twi book titled, “Efie Ne Skuul”. In lieu of exotic science books and imported theories, we were raised to be hands–on practitioners, always with something to show from our efforts.
The work ethic was a hefty part of the curriculum; we were expected to produce tangible results, and we did. J.E. Kwegyir Aggrey (1875 – 1927) would have been so pleased with the self-help for independence. Without knowing it, we acted on his principle for good education, namely, “Don’t tell me what you know; show me what you can do.
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Solid foundation
A solid, lasting foundation depends on the learning process itself: promoting interaction between doing, thinking, reflecting, and doing again through the gradual release of responsibility approach. If we followed that premise in education in Ghana, soon enough, we’d evolve out of lethargy, apathy, unemployment and poverty.
The concept of backwards-design from the concrete to the abstract is a most powerful tool for learning-designers to ponder on. With none or less books you learn more from your own hands. The principle of work ethic, invariably, is tied in with learning to do things that are necessary to do and being prepared to do so. For instance, must our public schools in the 21st century continue to sit in dust? Work is not a “joke”; it has to be expected and relished, and not feared. Human progress is a summation of centuries of good solid work.
[Email: anishaffar@gmail.com]