Survey Reveals 98% of Primary Two Pupils Cannot Read or Understand English in Ghana | Can Our Educational Standards Get Any Worse?

It seems like the evidence indicting the quality of education in Ghana keeps mounting up. The shock over the abysmal performances in the WASSCE has yet to subside before a new survey has surfaced damning early basic education.

The beginnings of a person’s education is crucial because that is the stage the foundation for later education is built, and we all know a shaky foundation often leads to a faulty building.

There is a reason Mathematics has been a drawback for most WASSCE candidates for a while now, and it’s because the basics of the subject are often butchered, leaving the student forever handicapped in comprehending the more complex aspects of Maths that crop up from the Senior High School level upwards.

It seems like English is getting that treatment now, as a recent survey has revealed that 98% of students in Primary Two cannot read, and/or understand the English language.

The average age of a pupil in Class two is seven or eight years, whilst the main medium of teaching from Primary One onwards is the English Language. Therefore we have teachers regularly teaching practically an entire class who can barely understand a word they’re saying.

This is a pretty damaging report, carried out by Assessment Services Unit of the Ghana Education Service, with support from Research Triangle International.

You have to wonder what kind of education we are giving our children when they cannot even understand what their teachers are saying. And as I mentioned earlier the formative years are so crucial, making this current situation untenable as far as providing quality education for generations coming up.

We often wonder at the cluelessness of our leaders and how we remain underdeveloped so many years after independence and with a fairly sizable chunk of the world’s mineral wealth, and it is because the human resource of this country is one of the poorest the world over. Brilliant minds build nations, and with the quality of education, evidenced by this survey and the recent WASSCE results- should we really be so surprised that we continue to move backwards as a nation?

There is much that has to change about education in Ghana, starting with the bias towards the theoretical rather than the practical; but we cannot have children being held back so early in their lives.

The fact that the Ghana Education Service itself carried out this survey should suggest they should have some plans towards solving it. I would hope so, though being a problem being handled by Ghanaian politicians I wouldn’t hold my breath. Still, the things you pick up early stay with you for a long time after; but it seems for pupils in the lower basic school they’re going through the system practically empty- and no serious nation would put up with a situation like that.