FALLING STANDARDS IN BASIC EDUCATION- BLAME STUDENTS

There is no doubt that the quality of academic performances at the basic schools and the second cycled institutions in Ghana, is on a decreasing trend. Basic Education Certificate Exams (BECE) and the West African Senior School Certificate Exams (WASSCE) yearly results keeping dipping by serious numbers. Who is to blame for the bad academic results continuously produced by students who sit for the BECE? As far as I know, there are three categories of individuals to be held accountable for the educational downfalls. Students, Teachers and Educational authorities are the brains behind the production of these appalling results. The following paragraphs would highlight on the contributive roles of students in the bad results produced in BECE.

Students at the Junior High School (JHS) level are the first guilty culprits. They are the ones who physically register themselves to undertake the basic education certificate exams. Why should you register for an exam if you don't trust your academic preparation? The reason is that, maybe you are ready to fail. It is true to state that students at the junior high school level now even have better access to academic materials. Virtually all JHS students have phones which can be used to access useful course materials from the internet. Using statistics from my former school, it is very shocking that students who sat for BECE in the 1990s and early 2000s got better results than our modern day BECE candidates.

At that time, phones and computers were very expensive and scarce. Few people understood what 'Google' meant. Also, the illumination systems for night studies at that time were lanterns and candles. Electricity was hard to come by. However, in our today's society, almost all important educational tools are at our disposal. Rural electrification projects have extended electricity to a lot of remote communities across the country. What is more? Good text books, Google, Yahoo, YouTube and a lot of educational websites have sprung up. Nothing except serious studies is expected from students at the JHS level. Since almost all educational necessities are within the reach of students today, they seem to have no good reasons for producing these substandard results. We can comfortably label our JHS students as being lazy, without being too wrong.

 Again, one obvious negative lifestyle of basic students is that, they waste much of their precious time in romantic relationships. The boyfriend-girlfriend 'diseases' have infected our students. They spend so much time with their loved ones, making phone calls and making love. Others spend so much of their time on social media such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on. After getting addicted to using internet slangs or shortcuts such as, LOL and LMAO, they finally end up writing such nonacademic terms in exams. Hence, the mass failures.

Please, listen carefully to this truthful story; not a fiction. I feel shameful to recount that I had a younger brother who went by the nickname, Radikal. He sat for BECE this year. Radikal was a naturally brilliant student. His teachers had so much trust and hope on him. Even though, I had been away from home for a long time, I equally believed in his academic abilities. The only fear I had for him was that, he was a lazy student who liked to gallivant and watch television programs, pressing phones and playing with friends. Finally, when he went and sat for the exams, he managed to convince me that he was expecting good results. I was a bit sceptical about his bragging.

Unexpectedly, when the BECE results were released, he pestered me to go and check his results for him. When I confidently bought the result-checker card and an entered an internet café, the results displayed on the monitor paralyzed me. I couldn't believe the grades he obtained from the eight subjects he wrote. They were almost all below average. However, when I reminded myself about his negative attitude to learning, I quickly endorsed his results as deserving. The annoying part was that, when I confronted him with his empty results, he tried to argue that maybe the results didn't belong to him. Truth be spoken, his name and index number were correctly written on the results sheet.

His unexpected results lead me to conclude that it is not enough for a student to be brilliant, he/she must be hardworking or studious in order to succeed academically.

In summary, this write-up has listed and explained that BECE candidates fail because they have bad learning habits. Others focus their attention on relationships, social media and entertainment. However, in the midst of their bad results, they have numerous access to textbooks, internet research and good lighting systems. Students therefore contribute a lot to the falling standards of education in our basic schools in Ghana. 

My next articles will separately look at the contribution of teachers and educational authorities to bad academic results at BECE level.

Thank you