What Is Education? What Is Its Value? Why Should Ghanaians Chase It as if It Were a Wandering Goat With Gold in Its Belly?
What is the education orthodoxy in Ghana? Some critics argue that access without quality is hollow; that inferior education is no improvement over none. This, naturally, sends the liberal-minded into instant convulsions. Their answer is rehearsed, polished, and delivered with a smile: Access and quality can rise together. Widening access does not diminish excellence. Scandinavia proves that both can flourish at once.
To which I must, respectfully, beg to differ.
Let’s start with the simple truth: no civilization begins life wearing a three-piece suit. Everyone starts barefoot and half-blind. Scandinavia did. The Norwegians—those frostbitten stoics and patient fishermen—only began producing world-class mathematicians in the 18th century, long after a thousand years of raiding, freezing, farming, and generally minding their own gloomy business.
Meanwhile, most of West Africa—most, not all—was still crouched in a natural growth of its own design, proud of it too.
Education—proper, sharpened, civilization-shaping education—has always been a luxury. Even in ancient African villages, only the few, the wise, the destined, received the full seasoning. Only a chosen few were initiated into the deep knowledge. The rest learned what the world required of them: how to plant the seed, fish the waters, fight for honor, herd the goats, manage a marriage, gossip efficiently, fear the ancestors, avoid stupidity, and go to bed early.
Public education, that late invention of industrial nations, was never a moral crusade. No, it rose from the smokestacks of industrial economies. It was an economic tool—a means for elites to teach peasants just enough. Elites—those with real education—designed schools to provide only the bare minimum required to feed the machines.
Public education anywhere, just like in Ghana, is not enlightenment. It is not self-actualization. It’s obedience training with chalk. Literacy is optional; compliance is compulsory. This is what public education is; this is its value, this is its purpose. In Ghana, it is about colonial compliance, liberal obedience, and mandatory schooling.
So one must ask: if proper education—real, rigorous, civilization-forging education—is out of reach in Ghana; if the country cannot even dream of industrialization without first sacrificing three cabinet ministers and declaring a national prayer day—why force mass education on the populace? What sense is there in insisting on public education for people whose economic base still wobbles on the wooden legs of pre-industrial labor? Why require algebra in a land where most industries look like the set of a 14th-century documentary? Why cram the heads of the masses with calculus when their hands will never touch a machine that requires it?
Must a cocoa farmer quote Adam Smith or cite Keynes to prune a tree? Must a galamsey laborer calculate derivatives before diving into a muddy pit? Ghana’s industrial sector still chews sticks, and the leaders—God bless their hearts—are either too dim or too undisciplined to strike a match.
So why not imitate the Scandinavians—not when they were darlings of the west, but when they were still barefoot and blinking? Educate a select few—yes, a few—properly, rigorously, and mercilessly. Forge them, temper them, stretch their minds until they snap and reform like steel. Hope—yes, hope—that they become the nation’s industrial vanguard in twenty years. Let them become your industrial captains in a generation or two. Then, when factories actually exist—when Ghana manufactures at least a toothbrush without importing the bristles; when Ghana finally produces something more advanced than plastic chairs and church flyers—only then should mass public education be rolled out to prepare the many for the industries the few have built.
Education without an economic goal is not education; it is a national daydream. Education without purpose is not education; it is government-sponsored hallucination. You cannot hand out certificates as one hands out communion wafers and expect prosperity. Teaching skills with no market is like throwing a sack of hammers and nails into a valley and praying the villagers will build a rocket ship. They won’t. The nails will rust, the hammers will become hunting tools, somebody’s uncle will nap on the toolbox, and the only thing flying out of that valley will be your disappointment.
Education is no miracle. It is a tool. And a tool is only useful when a nation knows what it intends to build.
Highly insightful commentary. Now how do we turn the behemoth we have turned education into tools for our reinvention?
Thank you, and that is a great question. I just hope that enough of us can come to accept that we need, as you say, reinvention. That would be a faithful step.
At a point we have to stop talking and act
Mabena Kunkpe Ansah It is true that at a point we have to act. Sista, we have not even gotten to that point yet as the people who should be getting us there misunderstand the fundamentals. The thing is we are confused. There’s no philosophical consensus on any subject, let alone on our educational system. In confusion we have no direction. Without direction, even the right action can be seen as chaos or be sabotaged.
Narmer Amenuti well it’s seen as sabotage or ‘crazy’ if you go out of the norm
How will he make friends? How can he go to secondary school, how can he write bece ? Stupid questions
Mabena Kunkpe Ansah Those are ridiculous questions. It’s frightening how much we misunderstand “education”.
Narmer Amenuti ridiculous, what happened to learning a trade and just mastering in it through apprenticeship and experience? Mokala women didn’t go to school but run our economy haven’t we learnt anything anaa because they ain’t wearing abrofo robs so we still think they are backward?
Maybe through apprenticeship and experience he will learn how to create the technology needed for his work , lewent how to make simple dehydrators and engines who knows
I have always harbored the thought that education must be based on the issue of what and how it should have beneficial effects for the future by what is being studied by the children. Our present pre-colonial style will keep the children from developing a mind that can discern the usefulness of what they learned to shape the future.
Correct.
LOL… “The rest learned what the world required of them: how to plant the seed, fish the waters, fight for honor, herd the goats, manage a marriage, gossip efficiently, fear the ancestors, avoid stupidity, and go to bed early.” That line is worth its weight of gold. 😂😂