“Yes I could have been a judge but never had the Latin for judging. I just never had sufficient of it to get through the rigorous judging exams. They are noted for their rigour. People come staggering out saying, ‘my God, what a rigorous exam’. And they so became a miner instead: a coal miner. I managed to get through the mining exams- they are not very rigorous. They only ask you one question; they say ‘who are you?’ and I got seventy-five percent on that,” Peter Cook, ‘Sitting On A Bench, Nightclub Act’, 1960s.
“…look at the English that is parading around in the 2000s. Journalists who review newspaper stories see eye to eye with us … one of them exclaimed: ‘I don’t know what’s happening to the English of our youth now. You employ a Master’s graduate and he can’t put two sentences together!’ I am not sure we can match this journalist frustration to frustration. But it is awful – the English that is parading around these days! Much the same complaint comes from Senior Executives. They are disturbed at the gibberish their new graduates write their memos in. The language is barely comprehensible”.
Professor Naa Afarley Sackeyfio’s predilection for English was on full display at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Accra, a few years ago at the Director-General’s Programme on improving English Language in public schools. It was in response to the public’s reaction to the ‘falling’ or rather ‘fallen’ standard of English in our schools these days. The voluntary team that assisted in this exercise included Dr John Sackey, Professor Akosua Anyidoho, Mr. I.K. Gyasi, Mr. T.A. Ntumy, Mr. S.W.K. Tsadidey, Mr. Kwabena Nyamekye and my good self. It was fuelled by Mr. Samuel Bannerman-Mensah’s concern for efforts to promote quality education through the proper use of English in Ghanaian schools.
Her paper was entitled ‘Towards Improving the Quality of Ghana’s English’. She identified two phases of our English: the period of the ‘Paradise of English’ where in the 1940s and 1950s a ‘Standard Seven/ Middle School Leaver could speak English that was solid enough for the King of England to understand him perfectly. The other phase was the period of ‘Bogey English’, which is paraded around in the 2000s. In ‘Bogey English’, there is “…no grammar to talk of. Its vocabulary is sparse. The only two adjectives it has are ‘nice’ for the things its speakers like, and ‘brutal’ for all shades of meaning, spanning from ‘grand’ to ‘awful’. The result is that when its speakers describe something as ‘brutal’ we of the older generation do not know whether that object is good, bad, very good, and very bad. Whatever!”
How did the older folk attain paradise? She explains that the 1927 (Guggisberg) Education Policy had laid down the rule in clear terms: “School was to start with the vernacular as a medium of instruction for the first three years, while English was studied as a subject”. To Professor Naa Afarley, this law was “simple, curt and neat”, and it made sense; for English as an unknown entity just like French, Latin and also Mathematics had to be treated with “awe and respect”. The old folk may remember the Oxford readers which, for example, taught Demonstrative pronouns contextually as: “This is Luka Kazi; That is Roda Kazi; These are the Kazis BUT those are the Ngugis”.
Rules of Grammar “were doled out, recited, and ingested…in unexciting, no-nonsense, clinical pronouncements like: A Transitive Verb commands an object BUT An Intransitive Verb has no object.”
Attitude was the operating concept, the moving spirit of the Paradise English which was a “subject to be studied in class, beefed up with prolific out-of-class reading, examined in, passed in and certified”. Teachers of English were equally sensitized, and the apple-pie order in which notes were prepared following a ‘Scheme of Work’ facilitated learning. As an instance, Interrogatives (Questions) were introduced only after Auxiliary Verbs had been presented and well digested by the students. The teacher of English had it in mind that despite the many irregularities within the Auxiliary system, the twenty-four troublesome Verbs were so essential to the syntactical arrangement of Question Formation that they were programmed to appear high on the serialized agenda of topics.
Professor Naa Afarley compares “…yester-years’ strict adherence to order to the mayhem that is rampant today”. To her, the “…current airs of freedom and justice for all and sundry have permeated the teaching scene” to the extent that in place of the rigid discipline of old, “we have a dishevelled tumble in which everyone is claiming a God – given expertise to produce his own teaching materials”.
The older generation of teachers can very well remember the preparation (of notes) one had to do when one was teaching English. First, the topic for the day: e.g. Transitive and Intransitive Verbs. Second, the Previous Knowledge (P.K) that was the foundation: e.g. Students know simple sentences involving the use of verbs: I can walk; I can carry the table.
Third, the Development of the lesson: from a quick revision of the ‘Previous Knowledge; through the new material; to the end of the lesson. Finally, the Recapitulation or Recap that involved the whole broad spectrum: from the Previous Knowledge (P.K.) to the fresh topic that had just been treated. And all these lessons were student-centred (child-centered), that is centred around the student who was the “focal point”. And of course, one ought not to be surprised to find the students being given ‘English mental’ just like ‘Arithmetic’ or ‘Mathematics mental’. The lesson notes were useful for ‘substitute teachers’ who might fill in for the teachers who might not be around to teach themselves. The lesson notes were to be submitted to the headmaster for marking on Saturday or Sunday morning at the latest. And the headmaster’s red markings could hardly be overlooked; the Supervisors could either openly watch or surreptitiously lurk around to see how the teacher delivered his or her lesson. That was the era of Paradise English, in which some of us- the older generation- passed through.
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By Africanus Owusu-Ansah
