ABSTRACT
IN this study we have attempted to assess the social impact of Western education upon the cluster of traditional societies which are now being welded into the newly independent nation of Ghana. This has necessarily involved a broad sweep of discussion ranging from the story of the struggling coastal schools in the eighteenth century to an examination of the characteristics of the contemporary student population of the Ghanaian secondary-school system. Yet one is impressed not by the apparent discontinuities of this story but by the persistence of similar problems, similar discussions, and similar educational consequences throughout the entire colonial and post-colonial period. To many observers independence seems to mark a tremendous watershed in the history of African peoples; the growth of independent African polities and experiments with new forms of political control appear exciting and unique. Yet this kind of ferment is not yet so apparent in the educational field. Although Western-type schools have been one of the principal agents of modernization and political change in contemporary Africa, they themselves have been perhaps less responsive to change and innovation than have other political and social institutions. The fact is that educational systems axe rather monolithic in nature, slow to manifest any rapid response to a desire for reform and, in consequence, current controversy in Ghana merely re-echoes almost two hundred years of identical argument about the nature and content of the educational process.
