GIVE ME BACK MY CHILDHOOD

By Doreen Hammond
MY name is Afia. I am 14 and would like to share my story with all those who would like to listen. Is it a sad story? Not exactly, but I wouldn’t call it a sweet one either. It is all about how I have been denied the sweet childhood my mummy told me she had when she was my age.
This sweet childhood of yesteryears is gradually passing me by and I may miss it forever. It is all about this enterprise called education which mummy insists I should have in order to become somebody in future. And so now I wake up at 4.30 a.m. in order to be in school by 7.30 a.m.
We live at one of the new sites in the city and so it takes us not less than one and a half hours to get to the school. So why don’t I attend a school around my community? Well, mum insists that she wants me to be in a GOOD school and the ones in the neighbourhood are not exactly her idea of good schools! So there are bad schools and good schools? And how does one end up in either a good or a bad school? Is it a matter of choice or what?
I get home around 6 p.m. every day, after two hours of slugging it out in traffic. After dinner and a quick shower (mum says every female needs a shower twice a day! True?), I go to my books to attend to the legion of homework that accompanies me home daily. With eyes barely opened after doing my homework, I go through my notes for the next day’s activities. Then I retire to bed late, feeling drained of all my energy.
If ever I harbour any hope of using the weekend for some rest and any personal work, that is not to be. At 8.30 a.m. on Saturdays I am back in school for weekend classes. And then on Sundays the home teacher arrives after church and stays till evening.
As if this is not enough, vacations are no longer used for the purpose for which they are intended. They are no longer about breaking off from academic work, playing with my friends and fallowing the brain for next term’s school work. It is all about summer school, even though, according to mummy, summer and winter used not to be part of our weather pattern. So even on vacation I have the misfortune of still being in school. My whole life is school, school and school!
Poor Afia, her situation is a general reflection of what most children, especially those in the cities, go through on a daily basis.
What has changed so much that preparing our children for the Basic Education Certificate Examination looks like preparing them to go to war? Yet, in spite of all the extra classes, there are complaints that our children are generally not performing well in the BECE, especially in English, the very medium of instruction, and Mathematics.
The numerous pronouncements made by the Ministry of Education and the Ghana Education Service against extra classes notwithstanding, they continue in earnest. Various sums of money are collected from parents to organise these classes.
The schools argue that the children need extra tuition to be able to cover the syllabi. Some make a case for extra classes as a means for helping the weak ones; that is, children who need more time to grasp what they are taught in class.
Some parents are of the view that the extra classes must be held in the interest of the children but should be at no cost to parents. Other parents argue that the teachers must be given some incentives, not necessarily remuneration, for teaching the children. Others are still of the opinion that additional classes or tuition is required when there is the need for final-year pupils and students to complete the syllabi.
Until recently when it became the norm in many basic and second-cycle schools, extra classes were used to polish up pupils who were about to write their examination. Teachers used extra classes to discuss past examination questions and give students guidelines on how to answer questions.
For now, the extra classes continue, in spite of the concerns raised against them, and pupils are charged for those classes. Even pupils in classes as low as Primary One in some schools attend extra classes. Indeed, in some schools failure to pay for extra classes results in hot lashes for the children.
This gives the impression that extra classes are a means for teachers to make some money. After all, when teachers go to the filling station to buy fuel, the attendant’s knowledge that they are teachers does not put fuel in the cars. They have to pay with money.
So why can’t the syllabi be covered during normal school hours? Is it that the syllabi have been so loaded that they are overworking both teachers and pupils, to the extent that even vacations are no vacations?
On most school compounds during vacation, it is common to see students dressed in all kinds of attire and hanging out in groups doing everything and anything, apart from studying. Is that what has become known as the summer school?
Have rest and vacation no longer a place in a child’s upbringing? What happened to the mock cooking (enkro bo), ampe, hop scotch, etc. that were part of our growing up?
While parents are busy looking for money to pay bills and fees, children continuously sit in the classrooms. Is it all going to be about money, since, for the schools, that seems the motivation for organising all kinds of classes?
Is the time allotted for schoolwork so short that teachers cannot finish the syllabi within the stipulated period? Children used to learn through play but they now have little time for that. They have to take their breakfast as they ride in cars to school and their parents use the little time between the time they arrive in school and the time they run off into their classrooms to teach them the homework they are loaded with.
And what impact do we expect a teacher who is always tired and overloaded with teaching to have on his pupils? Do they have time to prepare their notes?
According to the Head of the Public Relations Unit of the GES, Mr Charles Parker-Allotey, the GES does not think that the syllabi can not be covered within the normal school hours. He said, however, that the GES had decided that instructional hours in basic schools be increased from five to six hours to stop the organisation of extra classes.
The increase in hours would be at no cost to parents, he noted, adding that the suggestion had been sent in a memo to the Ministry of Education for consideration and approval.
The decision, he said, was in response to persistent requests by basic schools that they needed to organise extra classes in order to cover the syllabi. He said the GES management thought an additional hour should be able to help teachers cover the syllabi.
In taking that decision, Mr Parker-Allotey said, the management of the GES considered the burden on parents financially and pupils/students who got no rest because of the organisation of extra classes.
He explained that as early as 6.30 a.m. some pupils had to be in school for extra classes before the normal school hours began and have another session of extra classes, known as “extra extra classes”, after the normal school hours. He said the GES management considered the fact that workers in the Civil Service worked for 12 hours and that the additional hour for instruction in schools would not be out of place.
“The GES also compared the instructional hours in Ghana to those in other African countries and even some countries outside Africa and saw that we have very few hours,” Mr Parker-Allotey stated.
Child psychologists are of the view that for a holistic upbringing of the child, playing, especially with his or her peers, is very important. This is even so in our case where most schools do not even have facilities for outdoor games. Here, we are talking about games such as football.
What kind of children are we nurturing? We need to give children back their childhood!

Writer’s e-mail: aamakai@hotmail.com