By Otchere Darko

Educational planners in Ghana should give Ghanaian parents and children purposeful and goal-related education..... that is, the kind of education that progresses systematically and purposefully from one stage to another, and ultimately finishes with “job-placements” for those who leave the system at the points where it creates “exit-routes”. Both the content and length of each stage in the system should be directed towards the attainment of this ultimate objective. This write-up deals with determining the appropriate time-duration that each stage in our system of pre-university education should be allocated, to enable the above ultimate objective of education to be achieved.

Primary School education, which must aim at giving children the most fundamental knowledge upon which future education should be built, must have enough time duration to achieve its goal. In my opinion, the current duration of six years for this level is enough; and I believe the entire country has no quarrel with this duration. The second stage in Ghana’s pre-university education, which is the level that the Rawlings system refers to as Junior High School or JHS, should also be allocated enough duration to allow basic education at this level to broaden out and deepen, to ensure that graduates from this stage have as wide and deep basic knowledge as they require to fully appreciate the bases of the various fields of academic pursuit and thinking; and for such end-products to be able to determine and plan their future from that point. JHS should therefore be the level where children must be helped to equip themselves with the broadest basic knowledge that will help them to confront modern life, whether they intend to do further academic work in future; or whether they want to end their academic pursuit at the basic education level and move into employment and economic self-sustenance. Thus, by the end of the Junior High School, students who by now will be in their mid-teens should know:- whether they have the intellectual acumen, the will, and the determination to use the next state of formal education, that is the Senior High School, to prepare towards the pursuit of any form of Higher Education offered at various universities and other institutions of higher learning; or whether they lack intellectual acumen, will, and determination for Higher Education and, therefore, want to exit formal learning and enter full employment and must, accordingly, use the Senior High School to prepare for, and acquire the basic skills they will need to move into, and fill basic-level grades of job placements.

In my view, if the length of any stage of pre-university education in Ghana needs changing, then it should be the JHS level. To put it more precisely, if the Rawlings “6+3+3” system of pre-university education that takes twelve years to complete needs changing, then it is the JHS level that should be given an additional one year to enable it to prepare its students more adequately. With a good JHS education which is facilitated by the additional one-year course work, the SHS level could, and should be reduced to two years to bring it in line with all third-stage pre-university course programs existing elsewhere in the world; and for it to correspond with what used to be a “Sixth Form” program that did prepare Ghanaian students for A-level academic qualifications, before Mr Rawlings introduced his new system. *In my view, if we need to change the Rawlings “6+3+3” system, then we must change it to “6+4+2”, which will make the duration of pre-university education the same twelve years. Through such “plus-one-minus-one” change, Ghana can kill two birds, without having to waste another stone to do that; to borrow this common metaphor.

*I do not think that changing the system from “6+3+3” to “6+3+4”..... that is NPP’s preferred option, is convincing. This is because the additional one year that raises the aggregate pre-university education to 13 years is “wasteful”, in terms of the extra human cost, as well as the additional financial input needed. It is also unorthodox, because such change fails to bring our system in line with the system of education prevailing in most other countries in the world, where the last stage of basic education normally lasts two years. Even though the Rawlings total of twelve years of pre-university education tallies with the total duration of the systems in other countries, the “peculiar” nature of the break-down of that system, combined possibly with the poorly planned course contents of the various stages of the system, has made Ghana’s basic education “strange” and seemingly “inferior” to the systems operating in many foreign countries. This makes it difficult for Ghanaian children to join the systems in other countries, without having to drop classes and fall behind their age groups. Most importantly, the change introduced by Rawlings merely removed the colonial “tag” from our system of education; but it failed to replace it with anything “realistic” and “useful” that helps those who have to exit the system, before Higher Education, to leave with skills that can help them to successfully enter the job-market. In effect, Rawlings merely created “new school tags” and “new school uniforms” for pre-university education, without actually solving the problem of “unemployable school leavers” and “youth unemployment”. Worst of all, the Rawlings system lacks clarity, as to where Secondary School education in Ghana begins and ends.

Before Rawlings changed our system to what has become known as the “6+3+3”, we used to have a “Middle School” level of education *That “Middle School” level, which originated from our colonial past, was in fact “an insult on African intelligence”, since there was no “Middle School” system or its equivalent in Britain. So, why did the British add “Middle School” to our system of education to increase the duration of our Elementary Schools from six years to ten years, in the then Gold Coast Colony? Was it because they, the colonialists, believed that our children were not brainy enough to use six years for elementary education? *It was good that Rawlings cancelled the “Middle School” stage from our Elementary School system. But, if he cancelled Middle Schools, and yet seems to have brought in Junior High Schools that many Ghanaians see as “replacement” for the same Middle School system that he cancelled, [and which does not exist anywhere in the so-called “civilised world”], then what did Rawlings do? Did Rawlings give us a JHS that is equivalent to “Middle School”, or did he give us what was an equivalent of “Secondary School”? Was Rawlings not backing the colonialists to argue that “the Ghanaian child has a lower IQ”, if he brought in the Junior High School as a replacement for the abolished “Middle School”, and therefore as part of Elementary School education in Ghana? *The Junior High School should, in fact, be Ghana’s Secondary School; and that level should be given extra one year to enable its course programs to be upgraded and improved; and also to allow the duration of this second stage in our basic education to match those of Secondary Schools in other parts of the world, where children enter this level of basic education at the ages of 11+ or 12..... just as Ghanaian children enter the Junior High Schools at age 11+ or 12. The JHS level should be seen as an intermediate stage between the Primary School level below and the Senior High School level above it; with Primary Schools continuing into Junior High Schools and the latter, in turn, continuing into Senior High Schools. This means that neither Primary nor Junior High Schools should create “school leavers”, or what some people refer to as “drop-outs”.

To keep the total duration of pre-university education still at 12 years, which tallies with what prevails in most other countries, the Senior High School level should be reduced to two years, as suggested above. A two-year period tallies with the duration of the third stage of pre-university education in most other countries. That also was the period Ghanaians previously called, and other countries today still call “Sixth Form”, or “A-level” education. This SHS stage should have two specific “alternative goals”....... which should be to prepare: (1) students, who are academically suitable and willing, to successfully gain admission into institutions of Higher Education; or (2) students, who are academically unsuitable or unwilling to pursue Higher Education, to train for basic skills that enable them to successfully enter the job-market. SHS should therefore be an “exit route” for basic education, from which “school leavers” exit to enter either Higher Education, or basic employment. *The best way to facilitate this two-goal objective of the third stage of basic education in Ghana is for the Government to create two types of Senior High Schools..... (1) those that prepare suitable and willing students to gain qualifications that allow them to enter various institutions of Higher Education; and (2) those that prepare all other post-Junior High School students to acquire skills that allow them to exit formal education and enter the job market and be able to secure jobs that require the basic skills they have acquired.

*Altering the durations of the Rawlings system of basic education is necessary, but changing the system to make it more job-oriented is more crucial, in my opinion. *Also, it is important that any changes that need to be made in our system of education should proceed gradually, and spread over a period of ten years or more, to ensure that students who are already in the system are not disadvantaged. *Again, it is necessary for any Ghanaian Government planning major changes to the system of education in the country to enlist the backing of parties in opposition, to ensure that their concerns are taken into account, so that any final changes introduced will not be reversed by any future government in power, should that party be out of office. The gradual approach and the cross-party consensus are both necessary because changing a country’s educational system is not like changing one’s shirt. The process involves huge financial and human costs that have the tendency to multiply further, if and when such changes are later reversed by future Governments.

Source: Otchere Darko; [This writer is a centrist, semi-liberalist, pragmatist, and an advocate for “inter-ethnic cooperation and unity”. He is an anti-corruption campaigner and a community-based development protagonist. He opposes the negative, corrupt, and domineering politics of NDC and NPP and actively campaigns for the development and strengthening of “third parties”. He is against “a two-party only” system of democracy {in Ghana}....... which, in practice, is what we have today.]