NN37, May 2006
Special Theme on Education and Training out of Poverty? A Status Report
THE TALE OF TWO GHANA?S REVISITED: OUTCOMES TO EDUCATION FOR THE RICH AND POOR
By Leslie Casely-Hayford, Associates for Change, Ghana
Poor quality education is the dividing line between those who compete and are able to transfer their knowledge and skills into the modern economic sector and those who are left living within the rural traditional agrarian sector of Ghana. In the mid 1990s Kraft (1995) explored the difference in the outcomes of poor quality rural education and better quality often-urban education across Ghana. The study was a benchmark behind Ghana?s educational reform process. Research in the late 1990s continued to confirm the poor quality educational trends faced by most rural children and went deeper into unravelling the complexities of rural children?s upbringing, home life and their inability to access high quality competitive education. By the beginning of the 21st century, quality education was the main thrust of educational reform and educational research in Ghana. This summary explores the dilemmas which children growing up in rural Ghana face when they fail to enter higher levels of education and their inability to cope with the livelihood context of rural areas; it probes the views of children, families and communities ?testing? the formal education system in rural Ghana and explores factors which impede their ability to compete with their modern urban counterparts due to the limited options within the economic sector and access to higher levels of academic education. This is contrasted to the realities of what most rural children face in being ?trained to fail? and then not fitting back into the traditional society and agrarian based economy in which they must survive.This summary explores the growing disconnection between the entrants to elite schools within Ghana with guaranteed position, social mobility and right to higher education and those schools which are unable to provide a basic quality of education and therefore are restricting equitable entry of the majority of rural children to higher education. Using secondary data, which was collected at the tertiary level, and primary data from Ghana?s publicly funded elite ?boarding schools? the characteristics of children and school entrants have been explored. The author contrasts these findings to field work in northern and southern Ghana in order to explore how education and livelihoods are played out in the Ghanaian context. This summary also points to the indigenous education systems, which were in place to train children and orient them to the values, and practices, which would help them survive within the rural context and why today these ?traditional knowledge? systems are gradually fading away.