Raising Generational Foundations: The National Service
Advantage

...Thou shalt
raise up the foundations of many generations.–Isaiah, the son of Amoz

Simply put, this
is an interesting time to be part of the National Service Scheme (NSS). The Rip
Van Winkles may not see it though, since they are given to the bad old habit of
sleeping during revolutionary times. So tell them when they wake up from
slumber, that graduates of various disciplines are voluntarily identifying with
farming, long thought to be an exclusive preserve of the uneducated. Assuredly,
hunger is doomed in view of this increased participation of service personnel
in agriculture. This desirable change and other excellent strides speak hope to
our generation, and remain a support to the many efforts at consolidating our
status as a Lower Middle Income Country (MIC).
What I said
elsewhere, I say here, that the story reported of a fact-finding Bangladeshi
delegation compassing sea and land, just because of our country’s national
service model, is a heartening attestation that the pacesetting domain of
excellence is not an abrokyire heritage.
It is also an indication that we can be good not just at imitating but also at
initiating. The facts are plain as the day for those with eyes wide opened in optimism.
We as Ghanaians have all it takes to humbly imitate the good and proudly
initiate the better. Trailblazing initiators we can be, if we sideline the
ubiquitous ‘pull-him-down (PhD)’ politics, and collectively set our faces like
flint in confronting particular national problems.
With the release
of the 2011/2012 national service postings, tertiary institution graduates are
now duty-bound to variously contribute to national development for a period of
one year. It is widely expected that the ideals of discipline, hardwork, and
patriotism would be internalized by these would-be leaders in the course of
service. Take it or leave it, national service is synonymous with duty on the
part of every graduate. No wonder the Executive Director recently pleaded with
his countrymen to see national service “as a national duty call and not
punishment.” Can I say that the heckling tantrum at Winneba was fresh in his
mind? Yes, I think I am permitted, and
even encouraged to add that the plea is suggestive of his disapproval of that
in-house mutiny staged against rural national service on the University of
Education campus. This general plea need
not be denied, for to do so bro, is to be somewhat unpatriotic; it is to be insensitive
to Ghana’s developmental needs. There is an urgent need for the powers that be to
adopt an attitude of positive firmness, so as not to pander to the undue demands
of some cohorts in a student or youth wing of their political parties. They must at
all times insist on a marked
departure from “dreaming aspiration to laborious doing,” to use C.S Lewis’
phrase. Youth contribution to nation-building should go beyond that wishy-washy
what-government-must-do conversation to a concrete what-I-am-doing contribution.
The vogue now amongst many youth groups is to release press statements and that
ends there. Am I then insinuating that words are unimportant? No. Words are not
unimportant, but they must be complemented by decisive action if anything good
is to come out of them. And that is why I challenge all personnel to a sober
rethinking of Kofi Akordor’s belief of what true national service entails: “changing
the fortunes of a people whose situation
looks hopeless”.The proven
writer is more than right. He who turns his back on service in remote areas is
unfit (now and in the future) to speak and act on behalf of the people. Period!
Now, a matter-of-fact
illustration I suppose, will do much good in sensitizing you of Kwaku Atta’s
plight as a school boy. Got some time? Then come with me as we brave all odds,
I mean as we accept a service posting to a D/A school in a typical akorase. The
scanty population in the
village reveals the reality of rural-urban migration, especially on the part of
the success-conscious young. Your guess of farming as the main occupation is
right. Other employment opportunities, we say, are plainly nonexistent. If you
don’t farm, then poor you, there will be nothing to keep your mouth busy.
Set on a
partially steep slope, the village can be said to be an isolated one of sorts
with an un-tarred road that is hardly plied by the popular trotro vehicles. Most
of the inhabitants have migrated to urban centres and those remaining are not
passengers of a day in, day out regularity. So the road is manned by a one-gallon
taxi driver with his classic boneshaker. Your worries about the car’s road
worthiness may be discarded the moment you get to know that it’s a rugged
master, an accomplished veteran in the business of transporting passengers. And
don’t forget, it’s the most affordable, if not the quickest means of getting to
the village. The driver has a way of easing tensed feelings with his no-nonsense
congeniality. He knows almost all his passengers, and his plain gossip about a
teacher and school girl gives a general picture of an active grapevine during
the barely twenty-minute drive from a major town in the district to the village.
Let us skip the different
buildings that welcome you as you enter the village. They may heighten your
uneasiness about the whole matter as you consider where you will be lodging.
For the relief of your uneasy mind, a new JHS building has just been completed
and soon to be commissioned for use. The pupils would soon be moved from the
exhausted and collapsing old classroom block to this new standard structure. For
the sake of formality and other administrative procedures, let us enter the
headmaster’s office in the old school building. The office is a manageable
space with the characteristic sheaf of papers and folders arranged on a
neatly-covered table. Old metal trunks
and the musty smell of books tell you a great deal about the school’s colonial
heritage. After much discussion about confronting problems, inadequate teachers,
undesirable work attitudes, lascivious manoeuvrings, to name just a few, the
groundwork is laid for the commencement of service as a rural national service
teacher.
The Realities on the Ground
It was the first test in the JHS section and the host
class was form three; the final-year students preparing for the Basic Education
Certification Examination (BECE). It was a test of professional competence in the
handling of English language. Anyway,
it was not a ‘justify-your-inclusion’ kind of session. How could that be when
some of the classes were without teachers? Since first impressions are crucial,
the service personnel carefully chose words and endeavoured to endear himself
to the pupils through a mixed assortment of sentence and word usage. The
resounding “yes sir!” feedback to his optimistic “do you understand?” enquiries
assured him that something of a tangible change in intellectual know-how was
being achieved. Yes, teaching was dutifully going on and learning it seemed,
was drawing momentum from an unprecedented edition of great teaching.
Not until realism sank idealism did he realize that pupil
illiteracy was a reigning handicap. Not even a jot or tittle of what he said
was comprehensible to his head-nodding students. Final-year students were unable to
make out
the meaning of a simple English passage. Is that supposed to be a joke? No, please.
Okay, how about the simple task of distinguishing nouns from pronouns? That
passed as a difficult task to them bro, so they could not either. Well, let us
then give the pupils of primary six the chance to undo the disgrace done their
school by the seniors. So, we are in
class six now...But there was the selfsame diagnosis of a moribund literacy.
Holistic literacy must have surely pitched his tenth amongst them in years gone
by. At that material moment however, he was nowhere to be found. It was
difficult trying to distinguish an English class from a Ghanaian language
class. You have to halt, Mr. English teacher, and speak the local language if
you want them to understand what you are trying to send across. In a nutshell,
the illiteracy epidemic had reached abysmal proportions in the very institution
tasked with its annihilation. You see young faces with great potentials that
can be imperilled as a result of a reading deficiency. The simplest words could
not be any more pronounced than understood.
So Who
Takes the Blame?
Disheartening facts have been related, right? Maybe.....but
don’t turn your critical stares upon the teachers just because JHS students
cannot read, write and speak basic English. At least, this is in line with
GNAT’s reminder that teachers alone cannot make good students and thus should
not be blamed for poor academic showings. Should the pupils then be looked upon
askance? If you allow, then let us re-echo the oft-repeated refrain:
Those
kids, are they not lazy and recalcitrant? Pleasure-mad and without any
enthusiasm for reading? Are they not familiar with jingles from TV commercials
more than their textbooks?
Consider the free things at their disposal: Theirs is
the enjoyment of a fee-free education. There is the added benefit of having
free access to updated and curriculum-relevant textbooks. Their school bags
most often are unable to contain all their books. They come to school smartly
clad in uniforms for which their parents never paid a kobo. In some places, the
pupils are assured of a nutritious meal during school days. And there is this gift
of free transport for
those in the catchment areas of the Metro Mass Transit. What else do they want?
This dismal illiteracy is their own
creative doing; a self-inflicted intellectual disability.
Real-time
statistics can make social commentators right, even when they are culpable for
gross “pedagogical inattention”.Benjamin R. Barber therefore sounds out the clarion
call for adults to re-examine this captious reasoning. For this whole blame
game, he earnestly maintains, “reeks of hypocrisy” and reflects a growing national
comfort with the game of “let’s pretend we care.” Hear the Harvard University
scholar
as he reasons with the nation, with you and I at large.
...Pundits,
instead of looking for solutions, search busily for scapegoats...Others turn on
the kids themselves, so that at the same moment as we are transferring our
responsibilities to the shoulders of the next generation, we are blaming them
for our generation’s most conspicuous failures.

The
Unkempt Garden
Blaming kids for our generation’s most conspicuous
failures? That’s serious and ashamedly indicting! Without mincing words, I propose
that the unfortunate
development of schooled illiteracy and academic non-performance in general, has
everything to do with foundations; the relegation of kindergarten instruction
to the background. Rendered another way, the kindergarten neglect accounts for
the poor showing of pupil literacy in later years of formal schooling. Kindergarten,
in its original German parlance literally means “children’s garden” and it
represents the “form of education for young children that serves as a
transition from home to the commencement of more formal schooling”. It is a
sensitive period, a time of creative learning, of mastering speech through supervised
play and frolic. During this period, there is the need for tender gardening if
that inhibiting overgrowth of prickly weeds amongst dressy daffodils is to be
avoided.
Foundations evidently determine everything. That which
“is learned young,” C.H Spurgeon rightly quipped, “is learned for life.” Ever
seen a strong building with a weak foundation? If you have, then that building
is fated not to stand for long. Anywhere you are and in almost everything you
do, the good gives way to the better, and not the other way round. The kids who
shout out their mastery of nursery rhymes are those who in later life would
diligently commit to rote, complex mathematic formulae and scientific
definitions. Foundation is everything. Everything is all about foundations.
Here in our akorase,
kindergarten kids cheerfully come to school, but theirs is the unrestrained
play without purposeful direction. There is no teacher to make them laugh with
clowning antics in some activity-based learning. They don’t have any teacher to
lead them through a series of laughing sympathy for Humpty Dumpty’s comical fall.
Theirs is a deprivation of the opportunity to rhyme out their ecstatic
wonderment of the twinkle little star. With no drills in tongue-twisting, it is
evident that they are no more familiar with Peter Piper than with the peck of pickled
peppers picked. By now, you are wondering why the District Education
Directorate has not been able to do something about this. Well, I can guarantee
that the “we are very much aware” reply awaits your concerned enquiry. Anyway,
you can’t accuse them of inaction when there are no teachers to be posted to
take up appointments as kindergarten and primary teachers. The few posted end
up at the JHS because of the ‘urgent’ issues of preparation for final
examinations. With these in mind, it is easy to understand why some service
personnel are sent to help in the educational instruction of kindergarten kids
through activity-based teaching and learning. Only that it takes something more
than professed patriotism, something more than political party membership to
take up the challenge of this national punishment.
Now, Come to
think of it, what could make a graduate to see national service as a
punishment? Unrealized expectations. He
never envisioned himself teaching at some akorase D/A primary school. He never
thought that the embattled Mr. Kuagbenu could
overlook his credentials as a university graduate and assign him to teach
kindergarten children in a place far removed from Accra. This may well explain
why an allowance-earning duty sometimes becomes a punishment to a service personnel.
Added
to this is the uneasiness that he may end up aiding in the fulfilment of
Professor Aryeetey’s graduate unemployment prophecy. These are not things to be
simply brushed off.
Raising Generational Foundations
What can we say
to such a person caught up in this punishment?
The kindergarten and primary school kids in the village need your willingly offered
assistance. The schools are seriously lacking in quality tuition. The students,
without good foundations, are pathetically failing, year after year, and no one
knows the positive impact that your charitable help would bring to bear upon
their lives. Perhaps a pupil may in the course of your service, be greatly
encouraged to war against the endemic zero percent BECE record. You would be
peculiarly positioned
by your pedagogical privilege to effect desirable changes when all other attempts
at remedying the situation fail.
“And who then is
willing to consecrate his service this day” for the sake of God and country?
Who is willing to help “raise up the foundations of many generations”? If you
are, then here are some down-to-earth suggestions which may or may not find
favour with the experts from the colleges of education. Dare to try it, for it
worked for others in similar situations.
Cooperate with
the hardworking staff and stay away from those who are more given to talking
than teaching. They have a way of demoralizing you; of extinguishing your fire
of dedication to the herculean task of slaying ignorance. Never be in a hurry
to follow the institutionalized routine of completing syllabus for completion
sake. It is useless treating adverbs when they don’t even know what verbs are.
Sometimes there is the need for you to review the twenty-six alphabets of the
English language not just with kindergarten and primary kids, but JHS pupils as
well. You can also consider some lessons on how to pronounce and spell
two-letter words. Give them some time to master them and then proceed on to
three-letter words. You can add some tongue-twisters to strengthen their grip
on pronunciation. Be creatively alert as you gauge progress being made.
Be firm with
them and consistently register your disdain for absenteeism by instituting strict
punitive measures. Most of the headteachers will give you their unflinching
support. It is worth knowing that those kids are fond of skipping school for
the farm. Critically examine every I-was-sick explanation rendered as reason
for absenteeism. Most are concocted in order to avoid the resultant punishment
of truancy. Be careful about the supposedly innocent girls at the JHS. Araba
Koomson is impudently capable of expressing
(in wonderfully written letters) her infatuating affection for you even when
she cannot satisfactorily write a simple my-self essay. To be forewarned is to
be forearmed, beware, “for she hath cast down many wounded: yea, many strong men
have been slain by her.” Some promising personnel have had to abscond; to run
away from the service field because of their loose association with her. Others
inadvertently found themselves in one-man battles against exasperated town
boys. And you can imagine the various intensities of gratuitous jealousy-inspired
blows meted out to them. I have said much about this, because I don’t want to
hear you say one day that I didn’t warn you.
Reading
assignments should be regularly given even if you are teaching mathematics.
Otherwise, you will be a good teacher only when GES supervisors are reading
your lesson notes. Diligently seek to drop something into minds, and not just
teachers’ lesson notebooks. Also, it would be a nice idea to start a reading
club. Normally, you can start with old discarded books at the office. They are always
in abundance there. Let members of the reading clubs choose their own
executives. Always emphasize on the value of reading and be ready to gives
prizes like stationeries and confections to hardworking pupils. These prizes can
do magic as far as the whetting of pupil appetite for reading and learning is
concerned. Do everything humanely possible to be abreast of ideas in Anis
Haffar’s Youth Leadership Forum in the Daily
Graphic. Make sure you allow the distinguished educationist to inject some
of his brilliant and ground-breaking ideas into you.
Don’t be tempted
to despise these small and seemingly insignificant measures. They can be relied
upon to profoundly inspire lives to meaningfulness. For all you know, nine-year
old Kwaku Atta may one day be spotted boasting not about his mother’s cookery
skills, but proudly opining to friends and family, that you are “the best
teacher in the world.” And believe me bro, this artless citation would be widely
accepted, and you would be on your way to experiencing
the greatness that is intrinsically linked with true service.

Of a truth, “everybody can be great because everybody can serve.” I am fully
convicted of this and in no doubt also of your own agreement with Martin Luther
KingJr. Wait a minute....something just flashed in my mind...Circumstances and
people cannot take away from you, the choice to dream big dreams for your
pupils and service community. The decision to help raise the foundations of
many generations is solely yours. Oh, that all rural national service teachers would
consider this as they go about their daily duties.

Gideon Amoako Sarpong / aca_education a t yahoo dot
com/ 0243354091
The writer is the recipient of the 2010/2011 Rural
National Service Teacher Award, Gomoa West District.