3071-The political economy of new slavery

174 Child Labour, Education and Child Rights Among Cocoa Producers in Ghana
children, as certain teachers believe this is not in the best interest of
the child. This means that offences such as lateness will incur physical
punishment in some classes and not others. As a result caning can
become associated with individuals rather than individual offences in
the minds of the children. Second, they can be beaten if they fail to
answer a question correctly even in cases of genuine ignorance. This may
be better illustrated by the following example: one of the teachers in the
school of the village where I was based asked the children in class the
definition of technology, which they had learnt the day before. As none
of the children were able to recall it accurately the teacher caned every
child in the class. Many children see caning as part of school life in the
same way as learning to read or write and never question this practice
because they have grown accustomed to it. However, some of them
recognize that such punishment is much more arbitrary than punishment
in the home context and feel it is unfair. An American volunteer
who worked in a nearby village told me the story of a little girl who had
to be coaxed to school by her mother who even gave her small sums
of money not to cry and to remain at her desk. My American friend
summarized the girl’s aversion to school in the following manner:
‘Why would she think school is a good place? She comes there, she
probably has no prospect of moving up, she is forced to sit in a chair
while teachers lecture and yell at her in English which she probably
doesn’t understand and when they realize she doesn’t understand she
probably gets caned.’ While many campaigners and policy-makers
rightly encourage education and literacy, and many children in Third
World countries long to be in school, the experience of children in
rural Ghana indicates a need to remain pragmatic when promoting
school attendance. It also reinforces the need to improve conditions in
deprived schools in order to make education a real alternative to child
labour.
In addition to the problems identified above, frustration and disillusionment
are common among teachers in the rural sector due to
low salaries and meagre job rewards, which can result in poor-quality
teaching, lack of commitment and even poor attendance in school.
The majority of teachers I have interviewed during my research have
had other means of income such as farming or trading, and do not feel
they could survive without this extra source of revenue given the low
salaries in the teaching profession. Newly qualified, young teachers
resent being posted to small village schools lacking decent road access,
phone lines or electricity. Many school headmasters have long lost
interest in tracing up children from poorer families who are working