'Don’t blame the Youth for falling literacy standards'

The rate at which literacy in this country is declining is “reprehensible”, but young people are not to blame, Nana Nyarko Boateng, CEO of Gird Centre, a writing and editorial firm in Accra, has said in an interview with StarrFMonline.com.

“Young people are the victims of a derisory education system. Writing and reading are skills that must be taught, nobody does that anymore in this country and yet everybody complains about students and young people speaking and writing terrible English; of course they will speak and write terrible English, we need to reassess our education system”, she said.

“We are failing at a basic thing like communication. 50 years ago, Ghanaians spoke and wrote better English. We were functionally literate and that reflected in the quality of our professional and social lives. Ghana’s education system has gotten worse over the years. Our grandparents benefited from a better system, which made sure that literacy, numeracy, geography, and history were taught in schools”, she added.

Reacting to the acting Director-General of the Ghana Education Service, Charles Aheto-Tsegah’s comment on the Morning Starr that Teachers are the weakest link in the improvement of Ghana’s education system, Nyarko Boateng said: “Teachers are also victims of our poor education system”.

“When we design an education system that does not encourage people to pursue their passion, we end up in a situation like this. Teacher training schools and nursing training schools have been continually treated like second rate education reserved for those who could make it to the university. The conditions there are awful, how then do you expect to get the best kind of Teachers? There are people with real passion for teaching and those are the people our education system should be attracting. Until we make teaching a worthwhile profession, the best students will keep avoiding it.”

Boateng believes that to improve Ghana’s current educational system, “we need to stop blaming young people and start equipping them with tools that will make them functionally literate”.

Her organisation, the Gird Centre, is conducting a Writing Camp, a knowledge sharing and support facility for young Writers, Scholars, and Entrepreneurs in Ghana.