Chapter IY.

P^DUCATION TO-DAY: ITS DEFECTS.
In the Gold Coast we have, at the present moment, a very large number of primary schools conducted by the Oovernment and the missions. Our last returns show- that some 28,000 African boys and girls are receiving a literary education. In addition there are a number of small schools scattered over the country which are at present under little or no control and are conducted more often than not by schoolboys who have not received a higher education than our Standard IY or Y.
The literary education imparted is, generally speak- ing, only suitable for qualifying a boy who is leaving school to become a clerk or storekeeper. In spite of the greatest efforts of both the Education Department and the Missionary Societies, the system is one of the blind leading the blind, for the great majority of the teachers are Africans who have themselves received an inadequate education. But what is far more serious is that, except in a few isolated instances, there is a total absence of character-training.
It is not fair to make too sweeping a denunciation of our present system of education, for it has undoubtedly done a certain amount of good, but I am certain that, if continued, it will lead to disaster in the not distant future.
Putting the case briefly, we are at present turning out annually some 4,000 to 5,000 boys who are only fitted to he clerks, and, what is worse, the majority of whom
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could not, from their education, be anything but inferior clerks. We are flooding the market with semi-educated youths for whom, owing to their disdain of manual labour, there is annually less employment. The very fact that they are educated tends to separate them in thought and sympathy from their less advanced rela- tions; I do not say that this is always the case, but undoubtedly the tendency is there. Failing employment in an office, and strongly imbued with an unhealthy dislike to manual labour, they fall a natural victim to discontent and consequently to unhappiness. "VYe are, in fact, repeating here the history of educated India, which has long suffered from the adoption years ago of an incomplete European system. There is no more unhappy class of being in the world to-day than the great mass of semi-educated Indians whose only ambition is the office-stool and who disdain manual labour. It is a class that we are now manufacturing in the Gold Coast, and it is our bounden duty to unite together — Government, Missionary Societies, and the people — to divert the waters of education into such well laid-out channels as will irrigate fruitfully the whole land.
Summarising the situation, we are annually turning out a mass of semi-educated youths and have made no provision for the training of leaders. This is a most serious state of affairs, for, without the willing and efficient co-operation of African leaders, in thought, industries and the professions, we shall not be able to fulfil the sacred trust imposed on us — " the well-being and development of peoples not yet able to stand by themselves."
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