After years of struggle to mint an educational curriculum that reflects Africa’s environment, a new education curriculum is to be implemented this month by Ghana. Mrs. Angelina Baiden-Amissah, Deputy Minister of Education, in some sort of apology for lapses of yesteryears explains, “the curriculum being used in schools had not promoted cultural, political and patriotic awareness among the youth.” This may explain the argument in certain circles that the national education curriculum has been intellectually unbalanced and bankrupt.

For the past 50 years, Ghana’s national curriculum has not been holistic as Japan’s. The Japanese education system, rooted in  Oriental culture, Buddhist and Confucian teachings, and emphasizing self-criticism, stresses respect for society and the established order, and prizes group goals above individual interests. Like what the new Ghanaian education curriculum aims at, the Japanese education system is a mixture of the Western model and their traditional cultural values, dubbed “Western technology: Japanese soul.”

The inadequacies in the education system are being corrected Ghana-wide today, with education policy-makers taking good advice. This is creditable and demonstrates the emerging policy-makers’ and bureaucrats’ self-appraisal. Ghana’s progress should be driven by policies that either juggle or mix, where appropriate, its traditional values and the dominant neo-liberal ones. The intellectual and developmental climate that is changing for the better has produced, as Mrs. Baiden-Amissah explains “introduction of citizenship education in the curriculum of the new education reform to make the youth to be proud of the country's rich cultural heritage.”

The new education curriculum will help boost the dearth of confidence in the Ghanaian development process that is not strategically driven by Ghana’s traditional values. In a process of self-destruct, Ghanaians have weakened trust and faith in their foundational traditional values. As Mrs. Oboshie Sai-Cofie, Information and National Orientation Minister, explains “We have in our culture unchangeable ethical and moral precepts that all our people believe in.” The sum of all these is a country whose patriotism is psychologically disturbed – a process that indicates that Ghana has no foundational traditional values and norms to drive its progress.  

This is just the beginning of things to come. Balancing the education curriculum by inserting Ghanaian traditional values and norms is just the commencement. As an on-going process, the new national education curriculum that seeks to promote cultural, political and patriotic awareness has to be constantly upgraded in response to emerging realities – and this includes constant infusion of emerging Ghanaian cultural sensibilities.