School certificate – where a ‘pass’ mark means failure

Even its supporters were disappointed at the people selected to attend. Apart from being well past their prime, the majority of delegates were basically those responsible for getting us into this mess in the first place.Its conventional wis-dom that addressing the challenges facing our growing generation of youth and providing an environment in which they […]

Even its supporters were disappointed at the people selected to attend. Apart from being well past their prime, the majority of delegates were basically those responsible for getting us into this mess in the first place.
Its conventional wis-dom that addressing the challenges facing our growing generation of youth and providing an environment in which they can fulfil their aspirations is the most urgent priority if our social and economic targets are to be met. In spite of this, there was only token representation of youth at the conference, and even at that, it was mostly by “Youth Leaders” who are by no means young.  It stands logic on its head to believe that the views of the aged whose future was yesterday are more important than input of the youth who actually own tomorrow. The unnecessarily expensive jamboree was motivated by the antiquated thinking of policy makers who continuously try to prepare the future for our children instead of preparing our children for the future. The error of their ways has been underscored by the recent revelation that 70% of candidates failed to make the grade in their school leaving examinations. What or whose future could the delegates possibly have been discussing?
With this consistently high failure rate in the West African School Certificate (WASC) examinations there is no longer any hiding the truth that our secondary school system is in disarray. The majority of our schools (excluding the prohibitively expensive “international” academies) have substandard physical structures, and poor classroom teaching culture. Government approved private schools operate in uncompleted buildings with no qualified teachers, no libraries, and no science laboratories. Should we really be surprised that children fail massively in external examinations? Rather than close down sub-standard schools, or better still facilitate grants to improve the quality of their teaching, state governments demand higher taxes from proprietors, forcing them to save costs by tragically lowering standards. The results are now here for all to see.
Ironically this massive failure is a saving grace. Less than 25% of those who qualified will be offered admission into higher education because the places just aren’t there. In a situation where the nation doesn’t have the capacity to absorb even current numbers, we can only imagine what would happen if the WASC success rate was 70% and three the number of applicants seek admission. For years critics have slammed the 6-3-3-4 system as being inherently defective. It implies that everyone is expected to pursue higher education, and that anyone not qualifying is therefore a failure. In truth it’s the system that has failed, not the children. At the end of the day WAEC gives them a paper stating they have passed every subject, yet the system rejects the passes and accepts only credits. What then is the use of a pass? It’s a contradiction in terms that a WASC pass is in fact a failure!
There is an ongoing debate within modern academic circles as to the relevance of credits in admissions. It concerns whether a result of five credits and four failures is really better than three credits and six passes. Some feel justifiably that the second result is better because it contains no failures, yet it isn’t acceptable for admission into higher education, while the first is. This means in effect that policy makers expect school children to specialize rather than imbibe wide knowledge. But surely that isn’t the primary purpose of schooling? Knowing full well that higher education can never be available to everyone, schooling should be designed to ensure that the majority of children end up with good general knowledge and marketable technical or vocational employment skills. Using this criterion, the 6334 has failed woefully. After six years of secondary school, children who do not gain admission find themselves armed with a worthless piece of paper, and discover that the nation has no plan whatsoever for how they will earn an honest living, and contribute positively to national development.
Those in authority must take urgent steps to remove the tag of “failure” from the majority of children who will never proceed to higher education. All this of course is no reason why so many should have problems obtaining credits in the first place. Actually the situation is even worse than appears on the surface. Those who succeed tend to be either students whose parents can pay for extra lessons to supplement the poor standard of classroom teaching, or candidates who have successfully engaged in exam malpractice. For the rest (the majority), their predicament is virtually hopeless. To compound matters, working conditions in the teaching profession are perhaps the worst amongst all professionals. Indeed teaching is now regarded as a refuge for the otherwise unemployed who have no real passion or competence for task.
Government’s well docu-mented poor treatment of teachers coupled with the mistaken belief that any graduate can teach, have created a lack of respect for the profession. Calls for Colleges of Education to be upgraded into Universities of Education and award Bachelor of Education (B.Ed) Degrees have been consistently ignored.
Such a policy would increase higher education capacity far more economically than establishing universities from scratch, and be more relevant to our needs, bringing much needed new blood and prestige back to the teaching profession. Every year millions of our children leave secondary school and finish their education as “failures”. Policy makers would be well advised to appreciate that the less knowledgeable and more unemployable these teeming masses of youth are, the more the potential for them to be used for mischief in future.