Imagine for a moment that you are sitting on a bench near the street outside of your house and a young girl comes to rest beside you. You notice a storybook in the girl's left hand, and she says she would like you to help her read.
The young girl opens the book and begins reading the first page, which says, "My name is Robert and I am seven years old" underneath a large, colorful drawing of a small boy's face. The girl reads the sentence without trouble, commenting that the picture reminds her of a boy she once saw begging for food in the city center as she walked with her mother. On to the next page.
The second page of the book is filled with a picture of a giant gorilla, frightening at first glance but whose gentle, warm face quickly reassures you that he means no harm. Above the picture, at the top of the page, are the words, "My name is Buddy. I am a gorilla." The girl begins to read. She finishes the first sentence rapidly and with ease, except for some help pronouncing the name "Buddy", which she says she has never seen before. As she reaches the word "gorilla" at the end of the second short sentence, the girl's eyes suddenly leave the page of the book and dart up into the sky. She is in deep thought. After several silent seconds have passed, she says out loud, and with enthusiasm,
"Grow!"
"No, not exactly," you say to her. "Look at the word and sound out the letters that you see."
Her eyes remain fixed to the heavens.
"Go!" shouts the girl abruptly.
"No, that's not it," you say. "Look at the word."
At this point, the girl brings her eyes back to page two of the story book, but only in a fleeting glance before returning her gaze skyward. She is, once again, in profound contemplation.
"Greet!" she blurts out loudly.
"No, try again," you respond.
The girl is clearly lost inside of her mind. You realize now that her strategy for reading, rather than looking closely at the word and sounding out each letter in order to pronounce it correctly, is to look only at the first letter of the word and then rifle through the filing cabinets of her mind in search of any word she is familiar with that begins with the same letter. She shouts out each of these words as she comes across them in her mental notebook (of which most of the pages are blank), effectively providing a complete and completely blind guess of the actual word on the page in front of her. This is absolute madness. Think about it.
By this time, the girl's mind is becoming tired and confused. After trying the word "greet" unsuccessfully, her mind pick up on the final t and, somehow forgetting that the initial word (gorilla) begins with a g, she quickly shouts "truck!", but before you have even a second to politely inform her, once again, that she is wrong, the girl tries her luck again, this time with something that incorporates her previous attempt, but which is not even a word.
"Trucklepus!" she says with satisfaction, as though she has finally gotten the word correct and can now happily move on to page three.
"No!" you yell with frustration, amazement and a tint of sadness. "What is a trucklepus?" you ask sternly.
"I don't know," says the girl calmly and in a tone that clearly reveals disappointment and defeat.
Feeling bad at the girl's sense of dejection, you give her a soft pat on the back and encourage her to continue reading. You tell her, optimistically, that she will get it one day if she only keeps trying. But as she gets up and walks away, you cannot help but feel with certainty, after such an odd and unfortunate incident, that the girl will, in fact, never learn to read.
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The story above is based on an actual event that happened to me not long ago-- the main ideas in it are all true. The "young girl", in reality, is not so young. She is seventeen years old and attends eighth grade at a public, government-run school in Kumasi, here in Ghana.
Working with many students over the past year, I have seen this reading strategy, which is unusual at best and completely ineffective at worst, time and time again. Nearly all of the students I recognize it in attend public, government-operated schools. I do not wish to suggest that all of the students attending public schools do not know how to read, but spend some time talking with young boys and girls anywhere in Kumasi, whether they be six or sixteen, and you will quickly see that the public school system here has big, big problems. Allow me to explain.
Rose is a young girl of thirteen years who lives in the house where I currently stay and attends sixth grade at a public school in the neighborhood. She has attended public school for the past seven years-- since kindergarten-- and the primary language of instruction during that time has been English. Her teachers speak English during lectures each day, they write class notes in English on the blackboard, and students are expected to speak English during class discussions. There are, in fact, penalties for speaking the local language of Twi in the classroom. Open up any of Rose's school notebooks and you will find page after page of notes neatly written in English. There is only one problem, and it's big: say only a sentence to her and you will quickly realize that Rose does not understand or speak English at all. Needless to say, she cannot read. What about the notebooks full of class notes written in English? Rose simply copies notes from the blackboard into her notebook, but she does not understand a word of what she has written and cannot read a single sentence of it to you. I am serious. How does she pass her classes and continue moving on to the next grade level each year?
In Ghana and in many other areas of the developing world, students learn through rote memorization. Schools usually do not have material resources-- books or other-- with which to go deeply into any subject, and individual topics often are not connected to larger ideas or theories, or to alternate beliefs. Students simply memorize facts as though those facts were fixed, and isolated from all other things in the world. What is a community? will be written on the board, and in order to memorize the response, the students will spend fifteen minutes of their one-hour of class time chanting the answer over and over again in unison, as though they were robots programmed to behave in this way. A community is a group of people who live together and share common activities, beliefs and space is all that they are taught. No mention of the many different types of communities in the world, their various purposes, cultural differences in the way the term is defined, or simply the fact that members of a community do not necessarily live together and share the same activities, beliefs and space. Back to the question of how on Earth Rose is able to pass her classes without even a basic understanding of English.
When a short reading passage and related questions are given on an exam, the questions usually do not require the student to do any kind of analysis of the topic or to connect different ideas and formulate a unique and thoughtful response. Rather, questions are written in such a way whereas the correct answer can be found, almost word-for-word, within the given text. So although she understands neither the reading passage nor the questions, Rose is able to look at a question and scan the text for a sentence or group of sentences that contain some of the same words as the question itself, and write those sentences down as her answer. What she has written probably is not exactly the correct answer, but it may be close enough to award her the points necessary to just barely pass the exam.
Rose's situation, as well as that of the girl who came to me seeking help with reading, may appear extreme, but I talk to children nearly every day who attend public school, and have done so since infancy, and cannot read, write, or speak English correctly or at a level that is anywhere near the proficiency one would expect in a child of their age. These are stark and sad indications of the quality of the public education that some 80% of Ghanaian children are receiving, and they present a rather bleak, hopeless forecast of the likely prosperity and quality of life for such children in the future. But what exactly are the problems facing the public education system in Ghana and what can be done to eliminate them?
There are, of course, many factors large and small that play a part in making the public education system as broken and ineffective as it appears to be today. But perhaps the largest cause is that students simply are not being taught in the classroom.
A recent BBC report found that students in public schools in Ghana-- a majority of Ghanaian children-- actually receive instruction by their teacher, on average, for an appalling seventy days of the one-hundred-ninety-day academic year. Barely more than two months of school each year. Something is terribly wrong.
This is probably due to the fact that public school teachers are often unqualified, uncommitted and simply uninterested in showing up for work nearly as often as they are required to. Growing up in the US, I tended to believe that it is most often the case that one chooses to be a teacher because of a passion for the field and a deep concern for student achievement and success. My experience working with teachers in West Africa, including Ghana, tells me that individuals rarely choose the teaching profession for these commendable reasons. I can easily recall several teachers over the past few years who made no attempt to hide their contempt for the stupid, ignorant students in their care and who openly insulted students that were struggling to understand class material, and who clearly needed patience and compassion rather than harassment. In a country where good work and a reliable salary are very hard to come by, it seems that the guaranteed monthly paycheck that teaching provides becomes the primary motivating factor for many who choose the profession.
I once heard the story of a teacher who came into the classroom, promptly filled the entire blackboard with notes and ordered the students to quietly copy everything into their notebooks. The teacher, meanwhile, took this opportunity to call customers on his cell phone. He is a business man who imports household goods to sell on the local market-- a job that he will tell you he does "on the side", but which, in reality, takes up more of his time and attention than his primary job of teaching. Students soon began raising their hands to ask questions about what the man had written on the board, but he sternly told the pupils there would be no questions and that they should copy the notes quickly and then remain silent until the end of the class period. No discussion; no interaction; no learning. Imagine this.
Another likely factor that contributes to the current sad state of the public education system is that the textbooks which are used in class are, in general, very poorly written and offer an extremely simple, sometimes incorrect explanation of the subject. The reasons for this are quite interesting.
In Ghana, just about anyone who knows how to pick up a pen and scrawl out his or her name can write a textbook, have it mass-produced quite inexpensively in a 9" x 7" 60-70 page soft-cover format, and distribute it to various schools to be used as the primary textbook for instruction in the classroom. And this is exactly what people are doing. The authors of these textbooks tend to be university graduates, but many of them hold only a bachelor's degree, and it is too often the case that the degree they earned is not in the same subject as that of the textbook they have written. Holding an undergraduate degree from a university hardly qualifies a person to author a textbook that will be used to teach students. Many of the authors of these books boast on the back cover of the book of having passed junior high school and high school with A's and B's, or sometimes with distinction-- facts that do nothing to assure me that the content on the pages of the book is quality, professional and correct. Dozens of these kinds of textbooks are produced in a variety of subjects and used in schools throughout Ghana.
I was once teaching an English class at the junior high school level using one of these amateur textbooks and I began noticing the occasional grammatical or spelling mistake as I was reading it and preparing my lessons. Upon closer inspection of the book, I discovered several of these errors-- grammatical mistakes, missing articles, incorrect subject-verb agreement, incomplete sentences, incorrect or missing punctuation, and words spelled incorrectly or used improperly-- on every single one of the sixty-eight pages.
A friend of mine-- a British man teaching alongside his wife at the same school as I-- was casually reading the science textbook he used in his class when he saw a basic scientific experiment presented on the pages before him. The conclusion of this particular experiment-- the main idea that it was meant to teach-- didn't quite make sense to my friend. He said it did not seem correct, though he doubted himself because he assumed that such a glaring mistake could not possibly be found in a school textbook. After briefly researching the topic on the internet, however, he discovered that the experiment presented in his textbook was, in fact, completely wrong. The conclusion simply was not true.
If the textbooks used in class do not contain quality, correct information, then it seems unlikely that students will receive anything but a poor, incomplete education. And if teachers do not care enough about their positions to follow proper teaching protocols, answer students' questions and provide adequate academic support, or to even show up to school at all, then Ghana's public education system likely will not make substantial positive progress in the foreseeable future. I am sorry to say that the outlook, in my view, is not very promising.
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