“To many, formal education is no more preparation for service but an avenue for self-aggrandizement.”~ These were the words of Dr K.B. Asante, Ghanaian Diplomat and writer in his article “What Do We Want Education to achieve?”
While it is true that schooling enhances change in attitude and values, not everyone who goes to school these days ends up transformed as some have proven that they only visited classrooms to tickle their egos. Schooling has become a very fanciful venture with phoney educational institutions mushrooming by the day and people doing everything humanly possible to gain admission to one educational institution or the other in order to acquire certificates. The trend is more curious particularly at the tertiary level where getting degrees has become a matter of self-aggrandizement with people becoming more pre-occupied with the certificates they are awarded on graduation than with knowledge they would acquire. Consequently, most of those who are able to graduate only go about town telling everybody about their qualifications.
Basking in the glory of tertiary education without justifying that either through distinguished service or in one’s level of thinking and analysis of issues is vanity. That cannot yield development. The content of education must be in response to the developmental needs of society. What most African University graduates fail to appreciate is the fact that University Degree is only a means to an end and not an end in itself.
Purpose of Education
In an address titled “The Purpose of Education” published in 1947 by the Morehouse College Student Paper, Dr Martin Luther King Jnr observes:
“I too often find that most college men have a misconception of the purpose of education. Most of the “brethren” think that education should equip them with the proper instruments of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses. Still others think that education should furnish them with noble ends rather than means to an end.
It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the legitimate goals of his life.
Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one’s self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half-truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically.
Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.
The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals…
We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.
If we are not careful, our colleges will produce a group of close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts. Be careful, “brethren!” Be careful, teachers!
Academic Dishonesty
The world has advanced, creating space for everybody—almost everybody. Doors that used to be shut are now wide open. People who used to slumber are now very much awake and competition for goods and services has grown keener. Education is no more the preserve of the intellectually gifted. The rich, the powerful and the attractive all now attend school. The craze for academic qualifications has left in its wake high levels of corruption and public deception. Examination leakage has become so pronounced at all the levels of education in this country that people engage in it with impunity and reckless abandon. When in 2015 questions from the BECE leaked massively and some of the examinations had to be cancelled and re-written, few people would have expected that barely a year later, in 2016 there would be another examination leakage. These forms of dishonesty dent the credibility of academic qualifications hence the need to introduce character assessment.
From the foregoing, it will be very unfortunate for anyone to suggest that merely being in the possession of a certificate is proof of competence. That argument can only be sold by the conceited to the diffident. And those who expect everybody to stop everything they are doing and to listen to or watch them because they have or are pursuing a university degree need a rude awakening because the only thing people should watch anyone do or say in this technological age is the impact one’s education is bringing to the world. Instead of bragging about credentials, people should rather begin to demonstrate to the world how their qualifications are impacting humanity.
Traps in the System
The main purpose of getting education can be summarized as: to enhance competencies and skills as well as building capacity for social development. However, some people today have fallen traps in the educational system. Stephen Covey calls this Eternal Student Syndrome and defines it as: “endlessly going to school, never producing, living on other people’s golden eggs.”
This brings into focus an encounter I had with a young man at an ATM some time ago. I was among a group of people waiting in a queue to use the machine. This young man arrived, and few minutes later everyone around knew his credentials: he was a graduate teacher who had just returned from pursuing his Masters. It was a difficult and excruciating academic journey but rewarding. Date for graduation was yet to be announced but the next thing on his mind immediately was PhD while yet to put his Masters Education to use. Wow!
Youth and Power
There is a growing youth appetite for position and power with many young people putting themselves up for election to positions at various levels of government, largely due to the rewards associated with power: fame, money and privileges. From district level elections to national elections, young people have made their voices loud enough that they are no longer satisfied with being at the background working for their aged masters; that they are equally capable of occupying the very positions their masters occupy. They are quick to cite their academic credentials and some community work as reasons they should be preferred to other competitors.
Recently, at the National Democratic Congress’ Parliamentary Primaries, Young Sam George ousted his former master Hon E.T. Mensah to become the NDC’s Ningo-Prampram Parliamentary Candidate for the 2016 General Elections. Not long before that, Miss Francisca Oteng-Mensah, a 22-year old second year Law student of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology shrugged off competition from incumbent MP, Hon Kofi Frimpong (who has been in Parliament since 2004) to become the Kwabre-East Parliamentary Candidate in the 2016 General Elections.
Being interested in politics would not be a wrong thing to do, at least not for Kofi Annan, (former UN Secretary-General) who argues that: “Young people should be at the forefront of global change and innovation. Empowered, they can be key agents for development and peace. If, however, they are left on society’s margins, all of us will be impoverished. Let us ensure that all young people have every opportunity to participate fully in the lives of their societies.”
But the fundamental question remains: must one only become a politician to make an impact in one’s community? Certainly no! History provides a tall list of individuals who made significant impact on humanity without occupying elected office. Mahatma Gandhi is a typical example…
In this part of the world, people worship those privileged to go school, no matter how they perform during or after school. Parents and families make a lot of sacrifices to see individuals through school. But if the only thing the “educated” bring back home from school is a piece of decorated paper which they carry around looking for jobs and appointments, then I’m afraid it is better to remain uneducated.
“The purpose of education, according to Malcolm Forbes, “is to replace an empty mind with an open one”; in other words, make the individual develop analytical skills. But alas, the “educated” make uneducated arguments. I have seen them reach for logical fallacies and propaganda. I have seen them struggle to make sense of nonsense.
No society can develop when all that those with higher level education (those who have attended the universities and polytechnics) only sit in bars, restaurants and under trees to discuss and mock those without tertiary education and top it up with complaints about the un-availability of jobs.
No society can develop when her tertiary education graduates wait several years to get employed into formal sector employment; and when they finally do, they have nothing to contribute to the productivity of the institutions and organizations that employ them but are very much interested in getting improved and enhanced working conditions.
No society can develop when degree is regarded everything and character and mettle are not valued! ! Schooling should be the most effective means of getting education but when it becomes only a means by which people obtain hollow decorations with which they access privileges and favours ahead of the less-privileged, then schooling only becomes the ill-advised conceit of the scoundrel.
So when, next you come across someone bragging about their “degrees”, ask them: “degrees for what?”
interesting write up