Plato conceptualised education as turning the mind’s eye to light. In his words, ‘if a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life’.
He thus regards education as a means to achieve justice, both individual justice and social justice. Similarly, a former President of Harvard University, Derek Bok, and a popular syndicated advice columnist, Ann Landers, are among those credited with the quotation that ‘If you think education is expensive, try ignorance’. This is the context within which I comment minimally on the mass failure of candidates in this year’s Teacher Licensure Examination.
The failure rate raises so many questions and attempts to provide answers to these questions will not be complete without invoking partisan gimmicks. But in a democracy, this is to be expected; after all, the Platonic assertion of politics as an avenue where conflicting interests of different parts of society can be harmonised has not been discounted by democracy activists.
Parliament has called for a probe into the mass failure which, for some, is a political intervention aimed at making it appears that the people’s representatives care. That is also good, at least for the optics.
Wake-up call
The mass failure should be a wake-up call to our legislators that as the representatives of the people, they must at all times take off their partisan lens when it comes to deliberations on policies related to education. It may not completely be out of place, to allege that Parliament is part of the numerous causative factors of the mass failure. Sadly, as has been the practice, they watch on while the destructive seed is sowed only to scream aloud at harvest.
The current state of basic education in the country is not far from a mess and our Members of Parliament (MPs) are aware. These are the very people our MPs have overtly or covertly endorsed the policy of mass promotion at the basic level. Interestingly, when they write the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) again they are all pushed into senior high schools (SHSs).
Is it, not news that a BECE candidate scores grade 9 in all subjects and is allowed to go to SHS? If such candidate(s) need special attention, do we have such in our SHS to properly bring them to par with their peers?
