Gov’t must clarify church’s position in education delivery – Catholic Bishop
Most Reverend Matthew Kwasi Gyamfi, Catholic Bishop of Sunyani at the weekend called on the government to clarify and concretize the partnership between the state and the church in education delivery in the country.
“What the church wants is that the partnership between it and the state on education should be very clear and well-documented”, he said, stressing that “in the current Ghana education decentralization, the position of the church should appear in the organogram”.
Bishop Gyamfi said that justified the indispensable role of the church and the important contribution it had made and continued to make in the provision of quality and holistic education in the country.
The Catholic head made the call in Sunyani at a one-day regional educational workshop jointly organised and sponsored by the National Catholic Secretariat (NCS) and Star Ghana, a multi-donor funding organisation, on the theme, “Religious Bodies and State Partnership in Education
The workshop was aimed at “coming out with some guidelines that could be useful to enhance church-state partnership on education service delivery and governance as well as make concrete suggestions to the government concerning the role of religious bodies in education under the decentralization policy”. The event, attended by 50 participants comprising managers of religious educational units, teachers, retired educationists, the clergy and Assembly Members, was the last in a series of 10 regional workshops to culminate in a national one in October 2012.
Bishop Gyamfi stressed that “the Catholic church in Ghana believes that for a better collaboration with the state, there should be a documented partnership framework focused on problem-solving in the education sector than always lamenting about weaknesses and failings in education”.
He expressed his observation that the partnership between the church and the state in Ghana dated long before independence but the partnership until now remained fluid and undocumented.
“The 1887 educational Ordinance endorsed the principle that education could be better enhanced ‘when religious bodies are supported financially in the building and management of their schools’”, but currently the nature of the partnership, if any, is unclear”, the Bishop pointed out.
Bishop Gyamfi disclosed that the Catholic Bishops’ Conference since 1999 had taken serious steps to influence the government to review their partnership in education, adding, a joint committee subsequently drafted a new partnership agreement between government and religious bodies in the management of mission schools.
“The report of the new partnership was submitted in 2008, but sadly, the new partnership document had not been formalized by government’s endorsement”, he noted.
Bishop Gyamfi contended that the partnership framework would ensure that the church would be involved and consulted on all policy change and direction in the education sector “other than the current status where the church built schools and the government supplied teachers, but the former is not invited to contribute policy change”.
The Reverend Monsignor George Kwame Kumi, Catholic Vicar-General of Sunyani stated that most people believed that the collaboration between the church and the state in education had yielded positive results and “there is the nostalgia to enhance this working relationship further to yield better results”.
He noted that some people had expressed their observations that almost all the major interventions in the nation’s education programmes like “amorphous school uniforms, secularist religious and moral education (RME), manipulated CSSP and decentralization has had serious negative impact on the religious identity and formation of the youth”.
Monsignor Kumi asked religious bodies and parents to consider the present developments as a wakeup call to reassess their roles in the education of children, “who are being indoctrinated through some form of a socialist social engineering, nicely coated as RME”.
Mr Samuel Zan Akologo, Executive Secretary of the Department of Human Development at the NCS said “education is necessarily a joint enterprise without any reservation, emphasizing that the children being educated belonged to families, hence the state and government could not pretend to seek their welfare more than their parents.
Mr Akologo noted that faith-based organizations, especially Christian Missionaries, had been the trail-blazers of formal education in Ghana “so government cannot ignore the experiences of those stakeholders who antedated theirs in education”.
He said public opinion attested that mission schools were among the best in terms of quality and access for the less privileged in Ghana in contemporary times.
Mr Akologo said a partnership that recognized and provided for the interests of those other stakeholders in education “is not an option to be pursued or not, but a sine qua non for the attainment of holistic quality education in Ghana.
“Such a partnership should not remain at intention and goodwill level”, but needed to be actualized by concrete policy statement and backed by operational framework, he added.
Dr George Adjei Henneh, Brong-Ahafo Regional Director of Education, in a power point presentation tutored participants on the proposed Ghana Education Decentralization Project (GEDP).
He admitted that the GEDP was a broad document but a conspicuous lapse in it is the position of the religious bodies or faith based organisations in the country.
Mr Emmanuel Tommy Nkrabeah, acting Regional Manager of Catholic Schools in Brong-Ahafo, expressed worry that there was continuous misunderstanding between some Municipal/District Directors of Education and Regional Managers in the Management of Mission Schools.
Source: GNA