“For what profits a child if he or she reads eight courses in a term for examinations and understands nothing?”
That is a question worth asking at a time when Ghana’s education system is once again confronting uncomfortable questions about what our children are learning, how they are being assessed and, ultimately, what kind of adults the system is preparing them to become.
For years, the Ghanaian understanding of academic excellence has been closely associated with academic workload. The child who carries more books, studies more subjects and spends longer hours preparing for examinations is often considered the more serious student.
But there is a fundamental question we rarely ask: Does covering more books necessarily mean learning more?
What if a child can reproduce what is written in a textbook but cannot explain it, apply it or critically interrogate it?
What if, in our determination to complete the syllabus and prepare children for examinations, we have confused memorisation with understanding?
THE CURRICULUM THAT TAUGHT US TO REMEMBER
The overloaded curriculum has, over the years, been presented as one of the pathways to producing knowledgeable and exceptional students in Ghanaian society.
But has it?
Many of us who passed through the Ghanaian education system can remember the experience vividly: Aki Ola, Flamingo and countless other textbooks, notes and past questions competing for space in our heads.
I am a product of that system.
One scientific fact I will probably never forget is that ruminants chew their cud.
It is an amusing memory, but it also offers an uncomfortable metaphor for the way we have approached education.
The ruminant consumes, regurgitates, rechews and swallows.
Perhaps we have become too good at creating classroom machines that do something remarkably similar: consume information, reproduce it in an examination and move on to the next subject.
The problem is not that children should not learn facts.
The problem is when remembering becomes the ultimate objective of learning.
Education ought to produce children who can think, question, create, communicate and solve problems. Yet when the overriding concern becomes completing the syllabus and preparing for the next examination, understanding can easily become secondary.
THE CHICKENS HAVE COME HOME TO ROOST
The consequences of years of educational policies and practices appear to be coming home to roost.
The 2026 Basic Education Certificate Examination provides an opportunity to confront the issue.
About 620,000 candidates sat the 2026 BECE, and the Coordinator of the Computerised School Selection and Placement System, Sherif Sulemana, has disclosed that approximately 565,000 candidates qualified for placement into second-cycle institutions. This means roughly 55,000 candidates did not meet the placement requirements, with failure in either English Language or Mathematics cited as a disqualifying factor.
The figures are disturbing.
But the conversation should not end with:
“Why did 55,000 children fail?”
There is a legitimate argument that a single examination should not be used as the ultimate measure of a child’s intelligence. I agree.
A child can be creative, intelligent and capable and still perform poorly in an examination.
But there is another question we must confront.
If our education system has spent years preparing children for examinations, and thousands of them are still unable to meet the required standard in foundational subjects such as English and Mathematics, should we not examine the system that produced these outcomes?
That is the question that interests me.
Not simply the statistics.
The story behind the statistics.
WHO IS RESPONSIBLE?
The temptation whenever examination results disappoint is to blame the child.
But education is not produced by the child alone.
It is an ecosystem. There are parents. There are teachers. There is the Ghana Education Service. There is government. And, at the centre of all of them, there is the student who are the stakeholders with perhaps the greatest interest in education but the least influence over how the system operates.
To understand Ghana’s educational challenge, we therefore need to look beyond examination results and examine the responsibilities of each stakeholder.
GOVERNMENT: WHEN EDUCATION BECOMES POLITICAL
Education policy is inevitably connected to politics.
Governments determine policy, allocate resources, establish programmes, make appointments and introduce reforms.
Since the beginning of the Fourth Republic in 1992, successive governments have introduced changes to Ghana’s education system.
Reform itself is not the problem.
The concern arises when educational policy becomes vulnerable to political interests and ideological uncertainty.
Curriculum changes, institutional restructuring, political appointments and changes in administrative direction can create uncertainty in a sector whose results often take years to become visible.
Education should not be an area where every change in political administration automatically means a complete change in direction.
A government has four or eight years.
A child spends years being educated.
That difference should matter.
Questions surrounding the teaching of history, social studies and citizenship education are particularly important because education does not only determine what children know; it also influences how they understand their country, society and citizenship.
The same concern extends to public programmes such as school feeding.
When programmes designed to support children’s education like the School Feeding Program become vulnerable to partisan interests, patronage or procurement abuses, the damage goes beyond the public purse.
A child loses.
Money intended to improve the welfare of children is money that could otherwise have supported their education.
These concerns, however, must be investigated and supported by evidence rather than simply asserted.
The larger principle remains:
Education policy should be driven by the long-term interests of the Ghanaian child, not the short-term interests of political parties.
THE TEACHER: VICTIM AND ACTOR
Then there is the teacher.
It is easy to blame teachers whenever educational outcomes are poor.
But teachers themselves are products of the same system.
Some teachers are expected to handle multiple subjects and large workloads. In difficult circumstances, some may also struggle with motivation, remuneration and working conditions.
There are also concerns about teachers refusing postings to deprived communities, abandoning posts or pursuing other economic activities in communities where they have been posted.
These issues cannot simply be dismissed.
But neither should every teacher be painted with the same brush.
A teacher struggling under a difficult system is also a victim of that system.
At the same time, poor conditions cannot become a permanent excuse for professional negligence.
We therefore need two conversations simultaneously:
How do we improve the welfare and working conditions of teachers?
And:
How do we ensure that teachers remain accountable for the education of the children entrusted to them?
The two questions are not mutually exclusive.
THE PARENT: WHEN SURVIVAL COMPETES WITH EDUCATION
Parents also carry enormous responsibility.
Most parents want their children to succeed.
But wanting educational success and being able to provide the conditions for it are two different things.
Poverty changes priorities.
A parent struggling to provide food, rent, school fees and healthcare may not have the resources to buy textbooks, provide internet access or create the ideal study environment.
Some children also return from school only to become part of the household economy.
They sell.
They farm.
They trade.
They care for younger siblings.
They perform household chores.
So, we must ask:
What happens to the child’s education when survival competes with study time?
There is also the question of parental education.
Some parents themselves passed through an education system that did not provide them with the tools necessary to understand the changing demands of education.
How, then, do we expect every parent to guide a child through an increasingly complex educational system?
Again, this is not an excuse for parental neglect.
It is an invitation to understand the problem more deeply.
THE STUDENT: THE MOST IMPORTANT STAKEHOLDER WITH THE LEAST POWER
And then there is the child.
The student has perhaps the highest interest in education but the least influence over it.
What can a child say to a parent who says:
“You have to go and sell after school”?
What can a child say to a teacher who has abandoned his or her professional responsibility?
What can a child say to the Ghana Education Service about an overloaded curriculum?
What can a child say about the quality of the textbooks available to them?
Very little.
The child is expected to obey, study, sit the examination and accept the outcome.
Yet there is one area over which the child increasingly has some control:
attention.
And even there, the modern child is fighting a difficult battle.
THE NEW ENEMY: THE ATTENTION ECONOMY
Today’s child is not competing only with textbooks.
The child is competing with TikTok.
YouTube.
Instagram.
Gaming.
Constant notifications.
Short videos.
An endless ocean of information.
The smartphone has created a world in which information is available everywhere, but attention has become increasingly scarce.
The child’s attention is now a commodity being fought over by technology platforms, advertisers, entertainment companies and educational content creators.
This creates what could be described as a new disease of our time:
So, can we blame the child entirely when the same society demanding that the child read for hours is also surrounding that child with technologies specifically designed to capture attention?
Let us blame the government first and then parents before the child. Fair?
The child has a responsibility.
But so do the adults and institutions designing the environment in which that child learns.
BEYOND THE STATISTICS
Behind the approximately 55,000 candidates who have reportedly not met the requirements for placement are not just numbers.
There are children.
Children who had dreams.
Children who had ambitions.
Children who wanted to become doctors, teachers, engineers, journalists, entrepreneurs, nurses and politicians.
There are children who may now begin to see themselves differently.
Some may become demotivated.
Some may begin to believe that they are failures.
Some may abandon their educational aspirations.
Some may enter the informal economy simply because they have no immediate alternative.
And vulnerable young people can potentially become exposed to other risks, including negative peer influence, substance abuse and sexual exploitation.
This is where the conversation becomes much bigger than BECE.
It becomes a conversation about human development.
WHEN “FAILURE” BECOMES AN IDENTITY
This is perhaps the most important issue we need to confront.
We must be careful about calling children “failures.”
There is a profound difference between saying:
“You failed an examination” and saying: “You are a failure.” The first describes an outcome.
The second defines a human being.
Words matter.
Communication matters.
A child who repeatedly hears that s/he is a failure may eventually begin to believe it.
As a development communicator and a journalist, this concerns me deeply.
Communication can dehumanise. But communication can also uplift.
We should therefore be careful about the language we use when discussing children who do not meet academic expectations.
An examination can measure performance at a particular moment.
It cannot, by itself, measure the full potential of a human being.
By Ishmael Oduro-Acheampong
