We neglect rural education to our peril

A shout from the living room on Sundays in the afternoon is not foreign to me because I know by that call, my parents are about getting ready for me to lecture them on how to use their new Samsung phones and also sometimes take them through the ever helpful Mavis Beacon.

After an hour and a half of nerve aggravating ICT lectures for my two old parents who never seem to get anything I teach them, a tender voice will permeate through my ears saying “AH I have never regretted spending my last penny to let you be in school”, yeah!! that comes from my proud Dad, annoying at the ICT lessons, but lovely at everything else….well almost everything else

On the second floor of my primary school building at Dansoman in Accra, was this magic box that looked like the television at home, a man in spectacles, teacher "Kankpe" as we had nicknamed him sat behind it and shifted a rather small object on the table aimlessly to move a tiny arrow on the “small television”. As a class two pupil, I was fascinated at this, I could spend my entire break period watching him do stuff I had no idea about on the screen, I still don’t understand what he did when I look back.

By my third year in primary school many of these small TV sets had been brought into that room and we had begun what the teachers told us to call ICT lessons, I bet very few of us had any idea what it stood for. I loved Wednesdays because in a hot afternoon in the upper room was “show me what”, my ICT teacher AKA “show me what” as we called him. He managed to secure that name from stubborn pupils like me because he will randomly point at us and say “show me monitor, show me system unit, show me keyboard, and show me a mouse”. By age 8, I knew the names of all hardware materials in the ICT lab.

At age 10 I visited my extended family house at village in the central region during a long holiday, the myth surrounding children brought up in the city being the best in everything came to bear when on countless occasion I had to correct my senior cousins when they pretended to be teachers during playtime.

For these cousins of mine, having a TV set at home was nothing short of luxury, they did not have the opportunity to see a computer let alone touch one. When it was my turn to play teacher I realised they were lost when I try to imitate “show me what” the words mouse, monitor, system unit rang absolutely no bell in their minds.

Fast forward, I am now at the tertiary level and many of these cousins of mine, could not get past BECE. After visitng the village one more time in a really long while, seeing my senior cousins, some now shoe shine boys, labourers on farms etc, it dawned on me how grave inequalities in our educational system has played to their disadvantage.

Just a few weeks ago, about 450,000 Junior High School students sat for the 2017 Basic Education Certificate Examination all over the country. All of them, whether they studied under trees, death trap of school buildings, or plush air-conditioned classrooms answered the same questions.

The recent revelations of how a class six tutor at Assin Asamankese D/A primary school in the Central Region had improvised by using stones as a computer mouse to show pupils how to click, brings home the stark reality of how a section of our future leaders are painfully being left behind in a world that now runs on the wheels of Information Communication Technology (ICT).

Don’t be mistaken, the Ghana Education Service is very much aware of the importance of ICT to the development of pupils. A quick glance at the Primary 1- 6 teaching Syllabus for ICT, and you won’t miss the rationale behind the inclusion of the course in the curricular.

Rationale for teaching and learning ICT

ICT has become an important medium for communication and work in a variety of areas. Knowledge of ICT has therefore become a prerequisite for learning in schools in the current world.

This syllabus is designed to predispose primary school pupils to basic skills in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) so as build the foundation for further learning in the subject as they move into second cycle education and beyond.

The syllabus covers basic topics in ICT, and offers hands-on activities and keyboarding skills to build the required ICT foundation.

GENERAL AIMS
The syllabus is designed to help pupils to:
1. Acquire basic ICT literacy
2. Communicate effectively using ICT tools
3. Develop interest and acquire skills in the use of the internet
4. Develop basic ethics in using ICT tools
5. Acquire basic mouse and keyboarding skills.

The video of the pupils using stones went viral, it was funny as much as it was sad. What does the GES in the district, knowing very well there are no facilities to take these kids through ICT lessons make of their own syllabus?

Benefactors have rushed to provide a suitable ICT lab for the school after the story came to the public domain, but then how sad to say, this is one of many thousand rural schools facing the same problem.

Majority of student who complete Junior high School every year in the rural areas never had any practical ICT laboratory practice in their 9 years of basic education. The clever and determined ones among them will be quick to look for photos of a computer, to have an idea of the pictographic appearance of the miracle equipment beyond the images in a book.

Sadly the examiners will be assessing the scripts of the Morning Star school candidates in Accra and their Assin Asamankese colleagues with the same marking scheme. It will not matter that the Assin Asamankese students had no practical appreciation of the workings of the computer.

Without any equivocation, Ghana’s educational system is naturally discriminatory to the extent that until a student is able to convert a failing grade, he is effectively grounded and entirely cut off from opportunities of individual and professional advancement.

An abysmal grade in ICT will mean that an Assin Asamankese student who would have been a great computer programmer or Web developer will never see a computer again, at least not while he/she remains in the poverty riddled countryside.

A good beginning makes a good ending and with no shred of doubt majority of students from the rural areas are being denied a good beginning, making their chances of being successful in future extremely remote.

The government has the responsibility to resource school to ensure the progress of kids into successful adults, this task I’m afraid they have woefully failed at in this regards.

For how long are we going tolerate the neglect of rural education? how long are u going to continue to put school children in danger by making them study under trees or in dilapidated buildings that pass for death traps in our rural communities?

These same pupils would turn to crime and other vices in the future because we didn’t give them a chance to become like us, we shut the door of knowledge to them by not giving them what was rightfully theirs, good education.

And when they become a security nightmare for the country, we should all remember, Karma has no menu, you get served what you deserve.