The suggestion by Mr. Cyril Fayose, the General-Secretary of the Christian Council of Ghana (CCG), that the proposed Two-Track(ed) System or the Two-Semester System of operation of the Senior High School policy initiative, due to begin in September of this year, be first piloted with a handful of Senior High Schools before the new academic regime gets fully implemented does not hold water. Mr. Fayose’s suggestion is inadvisable because this system has already been tried and tested with resonant success in economically and culturally and technologically advanced countries like the United States, Canada, Japan and Singapore. It would therefore be tantamount to an unnecessary reinvention of the proverbial wheel.
Indeed, all that needs to be done presently is for our education experts to dialogue constructively with their counterparts in the countries mentioned above to see how best to implement the same within the local Ghanaian context, which may not necessarily be any different from the conditions that inspired the education leaders in those countries that have successfully implemented the Two-Track(ed) Senior High Schools. To be certain, the Akufo-Addo Administration may do well to explore ways of making our entire public-school system run in synch with the Semester System, if the latter proves to be more conducive and effective than the current colonially inherited system.
Furthermore, in proposing that the Double-Track(ed) System be first piloted before being fully implemented, the CCG’s Mr. Fayose seriously ignores the fact that the inalienable right of access to education by a remarkable percentage of Ghanaian SHS-age students – at least 20-percent of these students, conservatively speaking – would have to be unconscionably put on hold. Already, the otherwise promising futures of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Ghanaian youths have been callously allowed to go to waste by selfish and Social-Darwinian-oriented leaders, largely from the camp of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), over the last 40 years. Progressive and visionary leaders like President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo cannot afford to have ultra-conservative civil society leaders like Mr. Fayose to play regressive mind games with the futures of our children and grandchildren.
Indeed, people like Mr. Fayose, who have no remarkable track-record of fighting against the academically regressive three-year Senior High School system reintroduced by the Atta-Mills-led government of the National Democratic Congress, as a carryover from the Rawlings regime, which brought us to this deplorable state of affairs, cannot cavalierly presume to know better than the expert educators and thinkers of the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party that is poised towards the radical eradication of such abject social inequity, which has dogged the country since independence. This is not the time to unwisely and cynically attempt to rock the already steadily floating Akufo-Addo-piloted Danquah-Busia-Dombo frigate. Rather, this is the time to get all hands-on-deck.
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