Ernest in Ghana

In the Ghana school system, the year is divided into three terms. It is basically identical to the US system if you make summer school a mandatory semester. My first school term in Ghana was met with the teachers going on strike. As you can imagine, the strike puts us teacher volunteers in an interesting predicament. To explain further, I will have to get into some details which I cannot promise to be so exciting so I apologize in advance.

The strike caused great disruption in students’ learning. Near the end of their third year, high school students are to take standardized tests in all the subjects that they have studied. Their placement in tertiary educational institution (university, polytechnics, etc.) is based largely on their results on these final exams while their grades in school are of marginal consideration. In this system, Form 3 students are in this crucial phase where they have only seven months to prepare for the final exams. With the teachers not coming to the classrooms, few students learned except in rich schools where the PTA paid extra money to break the strike. Already being disadvantaged in terms of resources and quality of teachers, the poorer students now have to overcome one less semester of teaching to compete for the very limited seats of higher education.

The story with the teachers is not any cheerier. In Ghana, education and health workers are all employed by the government. Not long ago, the health workers went on strike demanding higher salary and threatened to pursue opportunities outside the country. The government gave in and agreed to their demands. The result was that an unskilled driver working in the hospital would make more money than would a headmaster of a school. Seeing the unfairness of the situation, the teachers went on strike. The short story was that the strike was declared illegal. That with the combination of stoppage in salary forced the teachers to come back to school after the three month ordeal in exchange for only a verbal promise of salary increase of an unspecified amount in the near future. What is more insulting is the fact that the government all this while is pumping out rhetoric of seeing education as their primary priority.

Governments of all nations are faced with the difficulty of utilizing limited resources to best serve their people. The only difference is that developing countries have less resources and much more critical needs. Ghana relies heavily on foreign aids to supplement its budget (around 50%). The latest buzz in terms of foreign aid are the Millennium Development Goals which focus more on the availability and access of basic education than quality of the teaching, which does not necessary seem unreasonable for a developing country. So it is difficult to fault the government opting to use its resources to make basic education free in poor areas over paying teachers better, especially when hundreds of million dollars are at stake.

With all this said, the point I am trying to make is that operating in a developing country is difficult. I witnessed a lot of finger pointing during the strike. Why does the government not value education more? Why are teachers so selfish, only thinking of their personal gain and leaving the students high and dry? Why are the students not self motivated enough to study on their own? Reality is that it is impossible to make everyone happy when you are so lacking in resources. Okay, I know, reporting from the department of duh, it sucks when your country ain’t got enough money. But experiencing it first hand has really made an impact on me. Moreover, problems like this make some of our “challenges” in the US seem trivial. I still remember the debate over whether to incorporate intelligent design into science classes taking up more than a month of air time.

Enough with my self reflections. So during the strike the students who did show up at school asked me to hold some classes. I figured why not. How hard can it be teaching high school classes… I started teaching core math, elective math, integrated science, physics, biology, and chemistry to the Form 3 students. Man, how many of you still remember solubility rules, permutations, Golgi apparatus, magnetic fields, etc. I have never done so much textbook reading in my life! It does not help that the students do not come to my classes regularly so I do not know when to repeat my lectures. I have a new found respect for all the school teachers out there. Thank goodness the strike ended finally. Now I finally get to teach computers which requires no reading :> More about teaching computer classes on my next blog.

By the way, here is a good article I found concerning Ghana: Ghana could mark turning point in foreign aid program

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 3rd, 2007 at 4:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.