Editorial

SCHOOLS ARE RE-OPENED FOR PARENTS’ HEADACHE

Education, apart from being the bedrock of nations’ development also proved to be a high-rise of enlightenment for nations’ citizens.

Nations that observe and take keen interest on their human resource and near-future development and its sustainability too, dared, at all cost, and against all odds, to make education, at all level free. And it proved long-term beneficial in their future than the piece-meal nature of those stingingly and unrepentantly practising the cash-and-carry, as at huge cost.

There are always a lot of brilliant-but-poor children, in fact, forming the majority in the African society today. These number boasts of huge nation-building talents – academically and technically.

However, their crime for perpetual punishment and consignment to the literacy’s dustbin has been the disease of chronic poverty afflicting their parents.

For that the parents become helpless and their wards, worthless. But this arguably ends up robbing nations of the badly-needed human resource naturally imbibed in those have-not children, whose talents could have been harnessed to help move nations forward.

In Ghana, the schools have just reopened; and it is the time of the parents’ headache once again.

Some schools, particularly, garrison schools built under the security services’ watch and in fact, being supervised by the wide-eyed soldiers, often indulged themselves in over-charging of school fees more that 600% of officially approved.

There are also all sort of books, some of which are even not necessary for the use of the ward, but because, teachers’ and or headteachers’ commission lay in there, the burden of purchase of such books becomes the headache of parents who are also always in the same financial-difficult boat like the teachers and their heads, who would always want to take their pound of flesh, at the beginning of the new school seasons.

That is not all; children are asked to report at school before 6:00 a.m., no matter what distance they come from – failure to comply, indeed, has seen most of these schoolchildren, sometimes, beaten to pulps.

In some disturbing cases, a garrison school in Teshie, has been repeating the children for their inability to reach school before or by 6:00 a.m.

This has indeed, resulted in some children being repeatedly repeated more than necessary at the same class, a situation which ends up affecting their morale and psyche.

Their promotional places become a commodity for the higher-bidding parents – with just admission form going for GHc20.00

However, the Ministry of Education as well as the Ghana Education Service (GES) seems not care about all these breach of social values and travesty of justice on the part of these greedy beings calling themselves teachers; whose actions and inactions not only demoralizing the schoolchildren but intimidating their parents too.

It looks like schools are often reopen for parents’ chronic financial headache, a situation the Ghanaian authority must strive hard to arrest for the good of the nation’s education system and smooth and accelerated future development.