Education and the Ghanaian Muslim Child

Ghana’s system of education has been modeled on the Western type formal education which, the Western European missionaries. The general attitude of Orthodox Muslims towards this type of education seems to have been negative. Orthodox Muslims in Ghana have among other things, perceived Western type formal education as an agency for getting converts to Christianity They have also regarded Western culture with contempt and have consequently tried to avoid contact with it. With these in mind, they seem to have successfully discouraged their children from Western Formal education. This attitude has resulted in high illiteracy rate among Orthodox Muslims and consequently causing social deprivation for the Muslims. This is because status in various fields in the Ghanaian society is achieved by means of Western Formal education This type of attitude of the Muslims towards Western Formal education seems to be frustrating Ghana’s goal towards development This is because one of the tools for development Is high literacy rate among members of the society; and literacy in Ghana generally means Western Formal literacy. It is therefore one of the major concerns of the government to help reduce the rate of illiteracy in Ghana in order to pave way for development The study therefore attempts to find out ways of getting Orthodox Muslims to accept Western Formal education This can be possible where effective investigation is made to identify the nature of attitudes that the Muslims have towards western Formal schooling and also the factors that determine such attitudes. The procedure for the research was as follows: a review of the literature and exploratory study consisting of interviews with people mostly of Muslim background was done. The population elements that were selected for Interview were pupils, adults, teachers and opinion leaders. Apart from the teachers sample some members of whom were non – Muslims, the other categories of the sample were all Orthodox Muslims except 50 per cent of the opinion leaders who were Ahmadiayya Muslims. The teachers and the pupils that were sampled for interview were selected from schools (which had been selected) by simple random sampling. Simple random sampling was again used for the selection at teachers and also for the selection of the classes from which the pupils were also selected on the same sampling technique. Cluster sampling technique was also used for identifying areas from which adults were selected. Quota sampling technique was in turn used for the selection of adults from the clusters. Purposive sampling technique was however used for the se1ection of opinion leaders. Data collection was based on unstructured observation, direct interviews and questionnaire with fixed alternatives and open end questions. Several finding were made from the research and they are summarized as follows: The Orthodox Muslim child seemed to show unfavorable attitude towards western formal education; and this had been caused mainly by the influence of their parent who have been reluctant to encourage their children to enter western formal education. They rather prefer Makaranta or Quranic education to the western formal type of schooling. To the Muslim, the Quranic education seems to contain all the necessary knowledge that man require for living. It. was however, also found that even though the Muslims view Western Formal education with suspicious, they seem to have now realised that Islamic religion itself lays emphasis on knowledge and secular formal education as a whole and not just Islamic education or Islamic studies. Based on the information gathered from the respondents there seems to be hope that Western formal education could possibly be welcomed by Orthodox Muslims if the former would be planned to incorporate the interest of Muslims as well Three models have been suggested as possible solutions to the problem about Muslims and Western Formal education. These are assimilation’, hybrid’ and pluralism’ models

Source: KNUST