It is no secret in today’s world that every nation is as prosperous as the quality of human resources it can boast of. How intelligent, innovative, daring, enterprising and ingenious your citizens are especially the youth will determine how fast and far your country can develop.
The sole mandate of moulding and bringing out the hidden talents of a person in our country is virtually vested in the educational institutions of our country.
The president of the republic of Ghana said a few days ago that, our children must be very confident knowing that the quality of education they are fed with is good enough to make them compete on a levelled platform with all the people across the world. But is this really the case with the Ghanaian student? Are we receiving the kind of education that will make us compete favourably with the America’s, the Britain’s and the Europe’s of this world?
For the past couple of years, the ministry of education has being working so hard to improve the quality of education across the country especially at the basic level. They’ve being distributing a number of textbooks, uniforms and exercise books among others all in the quest to improve quality. But the question is whether they are really attaining the results they intended to or is just a simple waste of our scarce resources? Or some regions are reaping the intended results while some are simply going down the drain.
My eyes were filled with tears as thick as thieves as I read a report put out by the Volta regional director of education Mr. Emmanuel Ketteku. I seriously weep for my noble region Volta. Could you believe out of the 27,305 candidates who took the Basic education certificate examinations in 2012 in the Volta region, only 11 candidates had aggregate six and only 12 candidates had aggregate six out of the 28,757 who sat for the same exams in 2013? Leaving me with no choice but to wonder whether candidates that will be taking the BECE come April in the region will make an additional one six or we will rather see a reduction in the number, maybe 10 candidates or even 9?
Where are the Dora Memorial’s, the Kabore’s, the Delta’s, the Holy spirit’s, the St. Joseph’s, the Prince of Peace’s and the other high profile basic schools of our time? Have they simply gone mute or the making of the aggregate six is just becoming harder than it was during our days? Even if the latter is the answer then why are the other regions still finding the antidote and making their candidates come out with the grades?
The ministry of education in their recent survey realized that teacher absenteeism is the main cause of the poor performance in the BECE and it is not so surprising to note that the Volta region is leading this chart with a female teacher from the region missing 38 out of the 52 days she is supposed to be present in the classroom in a single term? And I guess such a teacher is still at post receiving her salary monthly and still complaining that the government is not doing enough to bring the best out of teachers.
I seriously weep for Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, I weep for my Volta region. We used to be the central bank of Ghana’s quality human resources with even our students competing favourably with the other students in the tertiary’s and high schools outside the region. What is gone wrong now? Where have we gone wrong? Could it be because we are using outmoded textbooks in the region as I was told by a teacher friend?
On a lighter note, the ministry of education is distributing about 60,000 better Ghana laptops to students and schools across the region. And I know the region will also receive its fair share of the proposed 200 community day senior high schools. Access to basic education has also improved drastically in the region over the last couple of years.
We can still climb up the ladder as a region, our region can still be among the best if not the best, our children and siblings can still make the grades and this can only happen if the supervisors, the teachers, the parents as well as the pupils of the region accept the fact that we’ve gone wrong somewhere as a region and take radical steps towards hijacking the downward trend of our educational performance.
Even though I seriously weep for my region, I still believe and hope that we can still rise again. We have done this before and we can still do it again. Arise children of Volta and let us paint a flag for ourselves that will fly very very high.
