School cannot be compulsory for every child. It goes against the ethos of all West African Traditions. There has never been an African civilization that had a system of education that it deemed fit for everyone. Or worse, that it deemed necessary to impose on everyone. Yet, in Ghana today, a nation that claims to inherit its consciousness from the ancient Ghana Empire—although it pales in comparison to it—it has become government policy to dictate a compulsory school system for all children. Not only that, Ghana imposes not an ancient Ghanaian system but a British-styled, now an American-themed educational system in every respect, on parents and their children.
“Your children must be in school. Or rather, your children must go to school,” is jumbled around as if the government of Ghana gets pregnant, carries a baby for nine months, births the baby and breast-feeds it into a toddler until it is able to hand it over to a set of parents to look after. No. The government does not and cannot do such a thing. Children do not belong to the government of Ghana. Parents have children. Not the government. Parents in Ghana have children, not the colonial government docked on the coasts of Accra that is maintaining its power through crime and malfeasance. Children do not belong to the government of Ghana. African children have never belonged to any government. Never! And they are not going to start belonging to government now. Never!
Children belong to the parents, then to the extended families, then to the clans and then only to their ethnic groups. This is ancestral law. Not the government!
Alas, what is now happening in Ghana as a result of the fast spreading of western liberal education among the Mis-Educated Than His Ancestors, the METHA, is the seeping into government policy the dangerous liberal ideology that governments can dictate, wholesale, what happens to our children. No they can’t and they should not! That very idea is blasphemous as it grinds, with tremendous friction, against the very essence of African culture and tradition. Parents are by definition the birth mother and the father, or by definition the stipulations of the customs of the ethnic grouping. Only these parents have the Human Right to determine and impose on children what fits them. Not the government of Ghana, not ECOWAS, not the African Union and certainly not any of the imperialist agencies like the UN or WHO that is dictating terms to the African Union.
However, the government of Ghana, through clandestine policy-making or short-sightedness (to be polite), is allowing western NGOs and Think Tanks from certain Mass Incarceration States like the United States of America, which imprisons its own people for absolutely no law enforcement reasons, influence domestic policy. For a nation whose two systems of native-genocide and chattel-enslavement of Africans on plantations, remains its unique foundations, the United States of America is an odd place from which to receive policy inspiration let alone from which to adopt educational policy. How can a West African nation that claims its consciousness from ancient Ghana entertain laws and policies meant for committing genocide and enslaving other human beings?
Nonetheless, the one-size-fit-all educational systems of the west, especially from the United States of America, are now beginning to rear their ugly heads in Ghana. Through this one size-fit-all school system many insidious and dangerous imperial acts can occur: with compulsory school comes compulsory vaccinations—this we cannot accept. With compulsory school comes compulsory curriculum—this we will not accept. With compulsory school will invariably emerge the liberal and neoliberal educational systems of the west and their warrior-styled state criminal detective social workers, which are tools for further and absolute oppression and alienation of parents—this we cannot accept. With compulsory school comes the defenestration of the inalienable parental, clan and ethnic rights to children. With compulsory school comes many, many bad and dangerous things we cannot accept.
More important, with compulsory school for our children comes the very disenfranchisement and subjugation we fear and against which we fight. The parents in Ghana, the extended families of Ghana, the clans of the Fante, or the Dagomba, or the Asante, or the Ga, or the Ewe, and beyond cannot relinquish this important human right obligation that we share with our ancestors. Else, we relinquish our own survival and we shirk our responsibility to posterity in defining how we want to survive. The right to live also comes with the right to choose how we wish to live—not under a compulsory school police state! We have to continue to share in our ultimate human right to choose what happens or does not happen to our children. This is our human obligation to the ancestors.
Tswa Omanye Aba.
When they do or say such stuff, I think in their nonsense minds they believe it’s way to make sure every child is ‘literate’, which isn’t even true, literate according to what or whose standards? Even the schools have become a tool for breaking the resolve and confidence of they children. As for me as and when I feel uncomfortable about a situation happening in the schools I pull out my son to stay home and self teach. He is learning so much about science and the environment by just observation and the internet, you should listen to him analyse and explain situations, I’m still looking at all the options available to us and also that suits his learning style, my son isn’t a slave because I can’t afford an international school or expensive dadaba school
Word! I have seen many children developing wonderfully from home than from school.
I won’t allow them dull his future with disparaging remarks because he isn’t able to pick up reading and writing than everyone else , I’m okay if he rather learns carpentry and decides to learn how to create cheap solar lights than memorizing English
I hear you. I couldn’t agree more. Wholesale education has never anywhere worked. Let alone compulsory wholesale education. That is gross nonsense. I support the autonomy of the parent(s) as the singular human right obligation to the child(ren) and the ancestors. I despise the role of government as parent and community all at the same time.
Plus, if the government assumes the parental role, who will become the advocate for the child? The parents are the best possible advocates for any child. Not the government. It makes little sense, if any, to raise a child that belongs to the government. That is utter nonsense.
WORTH debating on because one can have a child but it is a community that partakes directly or indirectly to care for it’s growth even to the point of visiting graves herein after! Question does an elected community government have a role and duty to play in a child’s upkeep?
I believe they can and should play a limited role. What I am against is their wholesale usurping of human parental rights to the child. The community can provide a school and even persuade the parents to enroll their ward. However, the “compulsory” thing is dangerous. Compulsory elicits crime and punishment. Which means that private organizations can and will gain influence on the government and use the structure to enforce their profit motives. A hospital or a pharmaceutical company can use the apparatus of a government enforcing “compulsory” school to enforce mass vaccination and a criminalization of parents who refuse it. Who benefits?
Narmer Amenuti There must be a comparative study of the pigmy, the Masai Mara herders and the indigenous people of Ethiopia to make value judgement.
The government of Ghana cannot police stolen vehicles coming through their ports, but they want to make school compulsory and criminalize it? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
How Did you manage to write all this things without schooling?
Fun fool
Let’s be pragmatic here. In order not to put a child into a disadvantage position, basic education should be free and mandatory. They can then pursue whatever vocation of their choice after completion.
It can be free and great. But not mandatory. Christians thought the same way… “In order not to go to HELL, all children MUST be baptized.” It took a while, and with much bloodshed, for sensible people, i.e. the rest of society that did not prescribe to that thinking, to break off from the “believers”.
How Did you manage to write all this things without schooling?
Fun fool.
Because, unlike your father, my father was not a deadbeat father. He taught me to read and write at home.
you’re not making any sense. How do you understand education ? If your father has the time to teach you other parents has a Job out there to do in other to feed home and due to that teaching is a profession for people.
Anyone who is education in whichever Form is not wise
I can’t understand a thing you write. Grammarly, perhaps? Or your father should have spent the nights after work hours, like my father did, to teach you how to read and write?
I don’t think Raph M’Bon understood the essay.
We are discussing why school in Ghana is compulsory and not voluntary, and this guy is over here genuflecting over the benefits of schooling and interchanging his understanding of it with education.
id*iot , did you read that he said children shouldn’t be educated ? Mmoasem
You see the kind of wholesale schooling that he is writing against , that’s exactly what you got so you can’t think and also have comprehension issues
Narmer Amenuti
How about those whose parents are illiterate – cannot read and write, who will educate them too? You are privileged with educated parents, do you think it’s so with everyone? Never underestimate the formalization of the educational system.
I hope you know that education never originated with the West – they too adopted it from our ancestors (Kemet).
Besides, how do you understand “Government”? Are we not the government?
How about those parents who are poor and cannot afford to enroll their children in a secondary school? Or a boarding school or university? Who will educate them then? The poverty/lack/victim Olympics is a constant refrain of those who do not wish to engage in proper debate. If schooling is so much a privilege, why force every parent to bring their child? If school is so great why can’t that decision live with the parents? Privilege too, is it by force?
And that is the point of the westernized neo-liberal mind like yours. The Madrasas of Mali were not compulsory? Or were they? The centers of learning in Kemet were not compulsory, or were they? What about learning and training in any part of African history has been compulsory? None! What has the private teaching or training a child got to do with the ruling government? None! My point!
Now, your liberalism does not end when you say “Are we not the government?” That is a patent liberal definition of government. Are the NPP supporters also the government under the NDC? I think you misunderstand the entire point of the liberal definition of government, which is that by holding the government accountable, you become, in essence “a part” of the government. This is a definition of consequence. It does not make you and me part of the ruling government, just part of the working of government, that is if we can hold the ruling government accountable. The ruling government then is not you!