3071-The political economy of new slavery

Amanda Berlan 173
the nutritional intake of working and non-working children may further
explain the low educational achievement of working children. Many of
the children who work on cocoa farms eat very little or not at all before
going to work on the farm or to school. The contribution of low food
intake and physical effort is likely to exacerbate their exhaustion and
affect concentration and learning ability. This idea is supported by a
survey carried out in the Abura Asebu Kwamankese District of the
Ghana Education Service, which found that virtually all pupils in the
district went to school on an empty stomach, and that this impaired
their capacity to pay attention during lessons (Daily Graphic, 30 May
2001). In addition, the heavy loads carried by children to or from the
farm (generally on their heads) are a cause of muscular strain, headaches
and injuries, which can also hinder academic progress. The conditions
described above practically illustrate how child labour can perpetuate
poverty by undermining the effectiveness of education and thus form
part of the ‘life-cycle poverty trap’ identified in Chapter 3.
A further factor contributing to low educational achievement and lack
of interest in school is the use of English as the teaching language at
secondary level, which is a source of difficulty in rural areas where local
languages are spoken much more commonly. Most children in villages
have not acquired a satisfactory level of English by the time they enter
secondary school. However, teaching children in their own language at
secondary level would be impossible for a variety of reasons such as the
lack of appropriate terminology in local languages for certain subjects.
A fuller discussion on the use of English at secondary level, which is
both an extremely complex and controversial topic in Ghana, is unfortunately
beyond the scope of the present chapter.
The issue of corporal punishment, generally in the form of caning,
also does little to stimulate the children’s interest in school. While
corporal punishment is common in Ghana, in my experience there is
a marked difference between the way it is carried out in the home and
in school. In the home offences likely to incur it include disobedience
to parents, laziness or theft and I have not witnessed a child being
beaten without having committed some kind of offence. Some children
have even admitted to me later that their parents were right to punish
them and that they had misbehaved. In the context of school physical
punishment has much more ill-defined boundaries. The justification
given by teachers and parents for corporal punishment is that it helps
maintain order and discipline and motivates the children to work hard.
While it may achieve these aims, confusion and resentment arises in the
minds of children due to a number of factors. First, not all teachers cane