Community Service for Junior Secondary School Students

In Western societies, education is conceptualized as having three main purposes: aesthetic, economic, and ideological. The aesthetic purpose aims at assisting students to develop a sense of self-esteem, self-fulfillment, and enjoyment of life. The economic function is about helping students to acquire skills, knowledge and abilities that can be used to perform a job as well as develop careers, generate income and profit. The ideological role, on the other hand, has to do with the development of a good moral conduct, civil virtues, and cultural awareness. In the case of Africa, one of the most valued purposes of education is to prepare the youth for adult life—to instill in them community values, personal and social responsibility, respect for the elderly and the culture. That is, school education is regarded as a process of socializing the youth in moral discipline. This ideological purpose of education, though has lost its luster, it is still hotly contested in Ghana and other parts of Africa owing to the conflict between indigenous African cultural values and those of Euro-America. However, the protagonists in both camps share a common goal: school education should contribute to youth development.

Youth development may be regarded as a systematic process of instilling values of personal and social responsibility, accountability, patriotism, and work ethic in our youth. As part of youth development, I am proposing a 96 hour of community service for every JSS 3 student as a mandatory graduation requirement. The 96 hours of community service translate into 2 hours of work per week, assuming approximately 192 school days per academic year (96 ÷ {192÷ 4}). Such community service would be performed in the town or city where the student resides or goes to school. Community service should be required of JSS 3 students in both public and private junior secondary schools.

Head teachers and assistants of junior secondary schools should be made responsible for coordinating the community services. They should assess the suitability of any work that a student intends to do for community service and give the necessary approval. They should also be responsible for monitoring the student’s progress on the community service placement and keep records of the amount of hours performed. The Ghana Education Services should be responsible for designing appropriate forms and other documentation to facilitate collection of information, assignment of students to community service placements, recording of hours performed, and monitoring of the student performance. As a compulsory graduation requirement, students who refuse to perform the community services should be penalized by withholding their examination results, certificates, and other recommendations required for admission into senior secondary school (SSS). Similarly, senior secondary schools should require the completion of community service before a new entrant is admitted. Nevertheless, the Ministry of Education in collaboration with other stakeholders should work out the specificities once the government has adopted community service as an integral component of youth development policy.

The need for our youth to perform community service can be justified on the following grounds. First, it would give the youth opportunities to acquire work-related experience and nurture their career aspirations. Second, it would offer the youth opportunities to contribute to the development of their communities. Thus, the community service may be construed as a modern equivalent of communal work that was prevalent in many small towns and villages in the 1970s. Third, the youth would be able to give back to their communities the resources spent on educating them. Since the youth in that age category are given free public education from the primary level to the junior secondary level, they owe their community a reciprocal service. And the community service is a token of their gratitude to their communities. Fourth, it would allow the youth to build or maintain an intimate connection with their communities. In this the way, the community service would serve as a means of bridging the gaps between communities and schools. Fifth, it would enable the youth to develop responsibility, accountability, and work ethic. All of these are necessary to develop our youth into productive citizens of their communities and country. Finally, the institution of the community service for JSS 3 students would result in an integrated model of youth development; thus, breaking with the atomistic thinking prevalent among our political leaders that youth development is an out-of school phenomenon rather than an integral part of school education.

According to my estimates, the average age of a JSS 3 student is 13 years, pretty much the same as a grade 8 student in the Western world. At that age, however, our youth are even more capable of doing a lot of things compared to their counterparts in the West. Our youth at that age could perform a range of community services, including but not limited to the following:

* Sanitation work such as cleaning parks, drainage, market places, offices, etc.

* Work to file and locate patients’ health records in health clinics, centres and hospitals.

* Help to dispense medications in health clinics, centres and hospitals.

* Fill out forms for patients in hospitals and clinics.

* File, locate and type documents in district council, electricity, Water& Sewage offices, etc.

* Work on crop and poultry farms.

*Assist the collection of market tolls and development levies.

*Work in retail and wholesale establishments as cashiers, stock takers, stock receivers, packers, etc.

* Do surveys and enumeration work for district councils.

* Work in mechanic or carpentry shops, communication centres, library, museums, etc.

This is an important historical period that we have to take youth development more seriously than we did in other periods in our history, owing to the corrupting influences of globalization. We should bear in mind that globalization is not merely about the free movement of goods and services across international borders. Globalization is also the free movement of “cultures” across national boarders, so to speak. This is because it allows countries with imperialist tendencies to dominate those with a weak cultural base or those whose cultures have not previously attained a measure of international status. A critical question that a dear friend of mine, Dr. Tieku, always asks is this: How is Africa responding to the forces of globalization? In other words, do we have a cohesive national policy to protect our cultural institutions and values and at the same time derive maximum benefits from globalization? Youth development should be one of our effective strategies to protect our youth against cultural corruption and imperialism wrought by globalization. And community service appears to be one of the policy interventions to achieve that goal.

*A longer version of this article with appropriate references and relevant data will be published by Educational Resources Information Centre (ERIC).

Fredua-Kwarteng
Department of Theory& Policy Studies/OISE Toronto.

Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.