A news story in last Saturday’s Daily Graphic special edition screamed, “University of Education, Winneba, withdraws 38 students for poor performance.”
The “poor performance” was their failure to achieve the minimum Cumulative Grade Point Average of 1.0. As I read the news story, my heart bled for the students.
Says the headmaster
The headmaster of one of the good senior high schools in town recently called my office to order for supplementary readers.
“Sir,” I said, “I thought the powers that be said schools should not purchase books?”
He was silent for a while. Then he laughed and said, “Let’s not discuss that. Look, our students must return to serious reading.” He then went on to explain a frustration that he and his teachers were grappling with.
“Our students’ academic work is going down,” he said, “and we trace the reason to their lack of reading.
Unless we instil serious reading practice in our students, many of them will wrestle with their academic work.
The cracks are already showing since we stopped giving them supplementary reading books.”
The headmaster hit the nail on the head.
Strong conviction
I have a strong conviction that any student who gains admission into a tertiary institution and takes his reading seriously will rise above a Cumulative Grade Point Average of 1.0 every semester.
Therefore, the lack of copious reading by students is to blame for poor performance. It is said that “proper preparation prevents poor performance!” Much of that preparation is reading.
One could say the same thing about other fields of human endeavour: CEOs and managers. . . must read to understand their businesses; parliamentarians must read in preparation for debates.
Teachers and lecturers must research to impart knowledge, journalists must constantly update their understanding of modern journalism, preachers and pastors must know more than they preach, and the list goes on.
Higher education
Years ago, if you told anybody you were in the university, the question asked was, “What are you reading?” not “What are you studying?”
Reading for the university student is a serious quest for higher education. You are in the university to acquire knowledge, and that knowledge is largely contained in books.
You must read to acquire it.
Reading is like mining for knowledge, as miners mine for gold.
If university students read diligently as miners break their backs for their precious mineral, they would earn better than a 1.0 GPA.
Never too hard
One day, as I sat alone in an empty classroom reading a book on Communication Studies at Legon in a Master’s degree programme, one of my coursemates saw me and remarked, “Lawrence, surely, aren’t you taking this course too seriously?
You are studying too hard!”
Was I? How can you be a student in a tertiary institution and not “study too hard”?
And studying hard means reading copiously.
Yet some students take university life as a hobby, a holiday, an excursion or a game.
They get distracted with friendship loitering, trapped in social media and hardly enter the library or read their notes.
Of course, we can excuse those who have mental, physical or health challenges and maybe genuinely struggling with academic work. May the good Lord reach out to such students with divine help.
As for the rest who don’t have such challenges, may they sit up and use their God-given ability to read for knowledge and fight against a 1.0 GPA.
Reading is like acquiring any skill; the more you practice it, the more you know it.
As a skill, therefore, the more we read, the better we get at reading and know how to derive knowledge from what we read.
That is why it is crucial that we inculcate the reading habit in children as they grow up. Parents and teachers who fail to urge their wards to read to master the art of reading have shortchanged them.
That deficiency will show up later in their academic pursuits when they need that skill to acquire knowledge from books to fight against a 1.0 GPA.
In the church
That deficiency is present in the church. The church as a school helps members to study and apply what we learn to our Christian life.
Unfortunately, many of us Christians don’t read; we don’t read enough of the Bible, let alone other Christian literature.
This failure to read Scripture to equip us in our fight against temptations renders many Christians unfruitful and weak.
We easily flock to new movements like the Galatians did (Galatians 3:10), falling for every wind of doctrine.
We are unlike the Bereans who searched the Scriptures to find out the truth about new movements and strange teachings (Acts 17:11).
If examinations were conducted annually in the church based on our Bible and Christian literature reading, would our “Cumulative Grade Point Average” be below or above 1.0?
Would we be withdrawn from the church for poor performance?
The writer is a publisher, author, writer-trainer and CEO of Step Publishers.
E-mail: lawrence.darmani@gmail.com
