Lessons from past education policies should inform current ones - K. B. Asante

A former Secretary to Ghana’s first President, Mr K.B. Asante, has underscored the need for policy formulators on education to pick cues from past state policies to inform current ones.

He said during the years of Dr Kwame Nkrumah, the country made great progress in human development by tailoring the structures of education along the country’s needs and wants.

But regrettably, he observed, the pull towards internationalisation of education had led to the cutting short of the full benefits that education ought to bring to the country’s development.

Mr Asante said this when he delivered a speech as part of lectures in memory of Dr Nkrumah in Accra last Tuesday .

The 10th in the series of the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Lectures was on the theme: “Whence Ghana? Whither the Nation?”

The lectures, instituted by the University of Cape Coast in 1974, are dedicated to the memory of Dr Nkrumah and address issues on the social, economic and political development of Africa in particular and the black world in general.

Sheepish copying

Mr Asante said the nature of the country’s education ought to be informed by Ghana’s needs, wants and aspirations and not a “sheepish” copying of what was termed “international”.

In the days of President Nkrumah, he said, the educational policies of the state were structured according to the developmental needs of the country.

But he observed that a good number of Ghanaians had forsaken the quest for needs-related knowledge and were rather running after various certificates for jobs that were non-existent.

Baggage of colonialism

Mr Asante said the current situation where there was a craze for international education formed part of the “baggage of colonialism that still haunts us”.

“Mental subjugation still exists,” he said, and noted that even free education abroad had “hidden costs” that would not suit the developmental needs of the country, saying it seemed the case that as a country “our brains have been conditioned by others”.

Writer’s email: victor.kwawukume@graphic.com.gh