ABSTRACT
OUR account of the functions of secondary education in Ghana would not be complete without an attempt to discern what aspirations and expectations students hold with regard to their future occupational roles within Ghanaian society. We now have a picture of the kinds of students who obtain secondary education but no evidence concerning what they expect to do with it. Yet one of the themes of this present study has been the delineation of the changing characteristics of the Ghanaian occupational structure. How far, indeed, do the aspirations of these students conform to or reflect the realities of that occupational structure? Or do they rather indicate that African students have highly unrealistic views about the occupational characteristics of the world into which they will enter?—a situation that will increasingly make for disappointment and frustration among them. Previous evidence concerning middle-school students would suggest that these latter are more realistic than many observers have believed, but in the following pages we shall be dealing with a far more tightly selected student body with correspondingly higher levels of aspiration. It must be remembered that the very expansion of formal schooling in Ghana has led to a decline in the occupational returns to a given level of education and it is important to see how far student ambitions reflect a re-evaluation of their occupational opportunities.
