Otchere, E. D. (2019). Lost in the mix: A (hi)story of music in Ghanaian basic education

In Ghana, music as a formal subject of study occupies the periphery of the curriculum. While a number of reasons account for this, the article highlights the one which has eluded the radar as far as Ghanaian music education scholarship is concerned. This reason is that music has not been given adequate exposure in terms of official policy on education in Ghana, to prove its worth. Based on the mere exposure theory, the article reviewed the major provisions for various educational reforms/ordinances passed for basic schools in Ghana from 1852 to 2007 and focused on the place of music in each of them. The study revealed that since 1852 (when the first educational ordinance was passed under a colonial government in the then Gold Coast) up to 1959, there was no official policy on music education in the basic school curriculum in Ghana. Music was introduced in 1987 as part of the Cultural Studies Syllabus. It was made to stand on its own as a subject  in 1994, but the syllabus for the programme was not ready until 1998. Nine years after in the introduction of this syllabus however, music lost the status of being a single subject in the basic schools as it was made a part of the horizontal interdisciplinary integrated curriculum of Creative Arts.