In the hurry to produce more “Sakawa” graduates of equal gender...

E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Ghanadot

May 29, 2009

With youth unemployment hovering at 26%, according to 2006 statistics, our esteemed minds in Accra are debating about the optimum length for the senior high school (SHS) years.

And wouldn’t you know, as any sensible person would, they have come out with the worse proposal possible; to shorten the duration from four to three years.

Supposedly, the underlining reason for proposing the shorter-year program is that the previous standard has been lengthy, costly, and not done what it was expected to do for society. 

So now, the four-year term has not rolled out the well-rounded, highly educated students society needs, therefore, it is time to roll out the old magic - the three-year shorter term.

How "three years" could do what "four years" hasn't done could not be explained. 

Note that the three-year program has already been tried, tested, and found to be good only at producing more semi-illiterate "Sakawa" graduates from our high schools.

But you get the point.  The fourth-year spent in a high school is now considered superfluous. In truth, it is now considered politically expendable and this has nothing to do with improving educational outcomes.

How did the regime and its political experts come to this sudden conclusion?

The age-old tradition for secondary school education was for five years.  Add two years of the sixth form and we had seven years of education before the tertiary level. 

Statistics on the current four-year program, an experiment ordered by the past NPP regime, are not out. The first batch of students in that program will be graduating in 2010.

But the current NDC regime couldn’t wait.  So, with no information on the four-year reform, there is already this steady drumming for speedy change. Why the hurry?

This hurry is first heard from the Minister for Women Affairs, Hon. Akua Sena Dansua.

The “four-year system," she is quoted to have said, "if not changed will make female students find it hard to marry.”

Not joking.  Marriage was her entire reason for this drastic change in the crucial stage within our educational system!

How such a preposterous statement could come from a woman minister of all people is hard to fathom, unless you assume that her objective for going to school in the first place might have been to finish quickly and get married!

Hopefully, the madam got married first before she got appointed to her ministerial position.  But note our madam minister never had a shorter high school term.  Her time preceded this experiment.  However, we must be happy to note that she made it as a minister.

Education, as a necessary tool for raising kids and bringing up good productive citizens, is now about the speed with which kids are processed through the school system.

The debate on the merit of school reform has enlisted support among some of our academics and politicians.  Point raised about the issue is mostly about the cost of long-term education, currently the extra one year.

Thoughts on high expectations from our schools and the accomplishment of our students and the generations to come have been side-stepped in the debate.  Our experts now worry about cost savings, as if that alone must be the essence of education.

Considerations based on behavior, enlightenment, success rate at exams, and productive chances at the job market have been forgotten in the debate.

Job availability, at this point, should point to caution with the three-year program.  Will there be jobs for the kids once we rush them through the three-year program?

Next on the list of worries should be whether they would know enough within the shorter years at high school to be economically viable to society.

The 26% unemployment, arguably the result of a previous short three-year term before the change to four, is haunting us now.  Many kids are now unemployed.  They invest most of their productive time practicing “Sakawa" crimes at internet parlors because of the lack of job opportunities. 

Even those that are employed now are barely literate.  You would think a practicum-rich fourth year to round up all that has been learned in the previous years would be useful rather than harmful to the student.

This fourth year could act as a buffer or an incubator to conditions ahead of the soon to graduate student; a time to further enhance skills and knowledge acquired, while the government gets the necessary respite, with the extra year, to improve on job opportunities for the eventual school leaver.  

But, if your mission for the whole education process is to hurry barely literate students through the school years, you can then hope to glean later electoral successes from these barely literate citizens.

With the three-year program, you are likely to graduate kids who don’t read or write well or understand the critical issues at stake come election time.  But you will get thugs that will neutralize the sensible votes of others at the polls.

Then, you can proceed to maintain and abuse political power because no one would be properly educated to care or understand or propose what ought to be. 

The process has already begun.  Some members on the SHS reform panel have gone political and are accusing the proponents of the competing four-year plan as being partisan.

 “The four-year SHS policy is partisan. It is not in the best interest of the country. It is unduly expensive at the estimated cost of GHC 90 billion and cannot hold,” said NDC partisans and as reported by The Daily Graphic, issue of January 29, 2009.

How, at the GHC 90 billion sums, the four-year program is costly and not beneficial is not stated.  Also forgotten in the accusation is the fact that it was the same shorter three-years term during the previous Rawlings’ NDC regime that has produced the current 26% unemployment rate.

 And how the three-year program proposed could be cheaper and still meet our needs at this time is also neatly sidestepped by arguments supporting the new proposal.

Instead, the advocates for the three-year program propose “for the instructional time to be managed efficiently.  It is as if the four-year goal forbids efficient time management of the educational content or the expansion of what is learned during those same years.

Professors Djangma and Ivan Addae-Mensah seem to have the right ideas for a common-sense approach at the recent SHS reform forum.

They said, “going back to the old system (of three years) without taking adequate steps to address the shortcomings will be disastrous, especially for the majority of rural and urban public-school children who always bear the brunt of education reforms that appear to be always predicated on the interests of the privileged minority.”

And they are right.  Bluntly speaking, there is no need for haste.  The economy is weak and is not demanding more labor.  The unemployment rate is high.  And we are also not at war, so there is no need to open the floodgate for recruits to the unemployment lines.

And some kids, released prematurely from school, will be caught in the streets - jobless.  But the advocates are not postulating the cost for this social danger.

Today, some of these kids are free in the streets of Accra and urban centers selling dog chains. These are the kids that a four-year school program could perhaps give another chance for success.

Professors Djangma and Ivan Addae-Mensah are correct in stating the problems for the shorter terms as succinctly as they did: “non-completion of syllabuses and lack of time or unwillingness for co-curricular activities.” 

They asked, "whether the country could sacrifice quality for cost” savings and add “that maintaining the four-year program would go a long way to improve the educational system.”

And to add, the four-year system could help flatten the unemployment graph.

Not surprisingly, the forum ended in a deadlock with no consensus on the subject. But don’t be surprised if this issue is raised again in the future, rooted on partisan grounds.

E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Publisher www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, May 29, 2009

Permission to publish:  Please feel free to publish or reproduce, with credits, unedited.