Ealier today, I wrote on Ghana as a case study for free education Part 1 and now, I’m concluding it. I talked about how the current Ghanaian government promised citizens a sustainable citizenship, and after a year of running, even the citizens “enjoying” the free education don’t want it anymore because of the trouble it’s putting Ghana through. I also talked about some ways the free senior high affected the standard of learning as well as performance of students because they know of wholesale promotion assured.
Now let’s get into another aspect of our free education series.
Free Education Affecting Standard Of Teaching
To be honest, I don’t think free education has affected the standard of teaching in anyway. It has only affected the learning curve of students (imo of course).
This all relates back to students no longer working as hard as they should because they’re assured of mass promotion from junior high school to senior high Schools. Mass promotion means a serious mediocre population are getting pushed together with everyone else.
The fee-paying module where students paid for their education themselves kind of “selected “ hardworking students to proceed to further studies. For most communities, the only way to further into SHS and then Universities was to excel really well in their exam, so this was a big motivation for them to put in the work and study hard. Now, students know whether they excel or not, the government has some kind of deal of for them even if bad.
Before mass promotion, there were smaller number of students in class rooms. You could find maybe 50-60 students in a class and believe me when I tell you this was small.
Now, schools admit so many students, they don’t have the facilities to handle them all at once. They have to split the students into badges based on the Double Track System.
The Double Track System is basically the government’s way of “managing” the population they just promoted wholesomely from junior high school to fit into the senior high school calendar. It is a a technique that allows for a greater population of students to be accommodated on the same facility without overcrowding. So what they do is that while the second set of students are home, they make the first set of students called the Gold Track come in first at the beginning of the semester, spend 2 months, and go on holidays for the second track to come in too.
Quality of teaching definitely won’t be the same because for one, there are different teachers teaching each Track.
Another thing also is that (because the tracks go on longer vacations) you mostly will observe that after the holidays, they come back to school with almost empty heads and there has to be intensive revision if the teacher has any hope of getting anything new inside their heads.
But is this double track system enough?
I wish it was. I wish the double track system really solved the problems the government anticipates it should solve. That the few students that will be on campus per track really were given the quality education he promised. That the school feeding program is able to offer good healthy foods to a few students in a track at a time. That the double track didn’t lazy up students and reduce competition among them to perform better.
It’s sad how many first year university students you meet these days who have problems speaking English itself. People that have gone through several years of learning and speaking English struggling with constructing grammatically correct sentences.
Free education is entirely feasible, but it will depend on the availability of resources to sustain it. It’s not just about starting it, but keeping it running. That is Ghana’s problem right now- not starting, but keeping it alive and running. We don’t have enough revenue to keep such a hungry project fed for as long we want right now. Maybe in the future, sure. But the Ghana now can not handle real free education without getting buried under debt.
As for the double track system, the less said about it, the better. I am of fervent hope that the next government will see reason and move to get us out of the mess we’re in because of our involvement with the IMF.
