Editorial: Save our young ones

The nation’s second cycle education institutions have rarely generated this volume of troubling headlines in such a compressed period. Within the space of a fortnight the country has watched videos of a teacher allegedly assaulting a female student at Nyinahini Catholic SHS, another allegedly engaged in sexual misconduct with a student at Bole SHS, final-year students rioting and committing arson at schools in Upper East Region and parents presenting motor vehicles and cash bouquets to their children on school compounds after WASSCE.

The Ministry of Education has responded with suspensions and directives. GES has interdicted teachers and issued warnings. The Ghana Police Service has appealed for calm. These responses are necessary, but are they sufficient?

What connects these incidents is not indiscipline in the ordinary sense. It is something more structurally serious; namely, progressive erosion of the school as an authoritative institutional space. A school functions – educationally, socially and morally – only insofar as its boundaries are respected by all who inhabit or interact with it; teachers, students and parents alike.

When a teacher exploits his position of trust for sexual gratification, he does not merely commit a personal transgression; he ruptures the foundational covenant between educator and student. When students respond to examination completion with arson and assault, they signal not just poor impulse control but a failure of the school to cultivate the civic dispositions it exists to produce. When parents transform school premises into arenas for conspicuous wealth display, they subordinate an institution of equalisation to the hegemony of social stratification.

Each actor, in other words, is treating the school as an extension of impulses the school exists to discipline.

The ministry’s suspension of graduation ceremonies addresses the most visible symptom. But we collectively need a more soul-searching conversation about what has produced this convergence of boundary violations. That conversation must examine teacher welfare, recruitment standards and accountability structures within GES.

It must ask whether pressures of the transitional academic calendar and WASSCE preparation are generating student stress that schools are not equipped to manage. And it must interrogate a broader cultural environment in which status performance has become so blatantly imperative that even a child’s academic milestone cannot escape it.

Reactive governance, interdictions after viral videos, bans after social media outrage do not constitute education policy. Ghana’s second-cycle institutions deserve better. So do the students inside them.

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