| Summary: | The pre-colonial era of Africa was characterized, among other things, by a
traditional or informal system of education. Some of the emphases of traditional
education were (and still are) Africans’ delight, expression and appropriation of
their beliefs, values, precepts and ideals. Despite these laudable emphases, the
traditional system of education is characterized by some scholars as lacking a formal
or systemized structure of knowledge production. Moreover, the post-colonial
debates on the influence of Western education in Africa in general and Ghana,
in particular, are conspicuously silent on Western education’s role in gradually
altering the economic ideology of Ghana from a mixed and socialist economy to
a capitalist mode of production. Using secondary data sources, this paper argues
that the traditional system of education was (and still is) somehow structured or
systemized almost as the formal or Western education. It also contends that Western
education is gradually spearheading a paradigmatic shift in Ghana’s economic
system from mixed economy to capitalism. It further maintains that recourse to
African humanities would mitigate the unbridled effects of capitalism in Ghana.
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