Construction of National Identity through Education

In many nations, it is assumed that individuals and groups are categorised into one ethno-national group or the other but all of them put together supposedly form one national identity. This national identity has varied roots and education is one of them.

In Ghana, colonialism and colonial education forms part of the national

identity of the people. Despite the fact that national identity is being foisted through education, there is a great deal of ethnic diversity in Ghana. This is not related to only Ghana as Bush & Saltarelli (2000: 8) tell us that “there is a great deal of ethnic heterogeneity within contemporary states, despite the implicit claims to homogeneity of culture and identity”. For example, Ghana is ethnically polarised where various ethnic groups jostle for a fair share of the national cake which various sectors of the economy suffer especially education. As we will see later in the empirical chapters of this study, some ethno-regional groups arguably did not get a fair share of resources especially those of education since the colonial era.

In most cases, the national education system is meant to maintain the fictive posture as well as homogenising cultures in the nation. In this sense, Coulby (1997) suggested that education does the homogenisation of cultures through the “invention and use of national literature” and the promulgation of a common “national language”. He calls these two mechanisms the “naturalisation of citizens” (Coulby 1997: 11). Also, Parsons Carl pointed out that “the school is the most tangible, interpersonal arrangement for developing a general sense of common and shared experience, of commitment and of belonging in the nation-state”. (Parsons 1999: 9). In the case of Ghana for example, a national curriculum was adapted by the colonialists alongside the use of English as a national language where all the ethnic groups in Ghana learn in school wherever they are. This has brought about a sense of national identity in the country in the sense that English is understood and spoken across the ethnic divide in Ghana. However, Anderson (2006: 46) has argued that most of the nation-states have 'national print-languages', but in some cases it is only a minute fraction that uses that national language in conversation and in writing. Another dimension to the formation of this kind of national identity through education is the homogenisation of the school curricular where all students study the same syllabus and write one exam on the same day and at the same time.

However, there is another side of the coin other than the adoption of a national language through education which helps in the construction of a national identity.

While I note that a national education systems and curricula are designed to serve

the interest of the nation, Churchill (1996) argues that the adoption of a nation-state model that has a national official language and curriculum favours some groups and to the disadvantage of others. To buttress this point, Harris cites K.

Mukherji's in his description of the process of reorganising Indian states:

It is the middle-class job hunter and place seeker and the mostly middle-class politician who are benefited by the establishment of a linguistic state, which creates for them an exclusive preserve of jobs, offices and places, by shutting out, in the name of the promotion of culture, all outside competitors (Harris 1987: 176).

As explained by Green (1997: 45), the imbalanced nature of national education systems seemingly came as a result of nation formation. He also argues that the expansion of education was a critical component of nation formation which clearly shows in states that were being formed like “France and Prussia after the French Revolution and in the northern USA during the Early Republic”. Also Anderson (2006:113-114) points out that the new states had “nation-building policies” that were both sincere, popular nationalist enthusiasm, and a systematic, even Machiavellian, propagating the national agenda through the educational system and so forth. With this kind of mixed-bag policy orientations, the emerging states could have been using some educational policies to achieve a populist agenda but not necessarily having a thorough and committed implementation of them. This has lived-up till date as Anderson (2006: 163) has advised us to trace our immediate genealogy to the “imaginings of the colonial state”. What he sought to do here is to cast a mirror on the colonial past to see and understand the present state. There is therefore the reason to suggest that our present posture is well rooted in our colonial past especially those states that were once colonialized.

In recent times, sociology of education is preoccupied with gender, sexual, ethnic, local and ‘’political’’ identities but what needs to be added is how national identities are constructed within the realms of globalisation and localisation (Tormey 2006: 311).

The role of education in the general process of state formation cannot be overemphasised. It is in this light that former British colonies such as Ghana still

have the educational vestiges of the British system where some schools still practice the boarding system of education where students are accommodated and fed throughout their stay in school. The next is to discuss the role of educational policy in nation-building.