The school bell had rung five minutes earlier. Its echo had long dissolved into the midday air, swallowed by the familiar noise of a Ghanaian school in motion — the dragging of wooden chairs, the shuffling of feet on cement floors, the closing of classroom doors. Break was over. The world, as far as that school was concerned, had resumed its ordinary orbit.
But somewhere behind the snack bar, tucked into the narrow shadow it cast against the afternoon sun, a boy sat alone. He was nine years old, perhaps. His elbows rested on his knees, and both small hands cradled his chin as though his head had grown too heavy for his neck to carry. He was not playing. He was not eating. He had retreated somewhere deep inside himself, into a place that no school bell could reach and no teacher’s voice could summon him back from.
I was a part-time teacher at the school, taking a casual walk around the campus, when I found him there. He had not heard me approach. The world around him — the laughter from classrooms, the footsteps on the compound, the afternoon heat pressing itself against every surface — had ceased to exist for him. He was nine years old, and he was already somewhere else entirely.
I asked him why he was not in class with his ffriends. His answer was quiet. Almost a whisper. “They laugh at me,” he said. “They say I don’t know Maths.”
There was something in his voice that carried both the weight of truth and the careful softness of a child who has learned to edit his own pain before offering it to adults. I listened. Then I asked him to take me to his class.
He was in Class Four We walked together — a grown man and a small boy who moved as though he would rather be invisible — and entered the classroom. The other children looked up. Something made me turn, not toward the students, but toward the walls. And there it was.
Pinned to the wall of that classroom, as casually as a weather chart or a multiplication table, was the results sheet from their midterm examinations. Every child’s name. Every child’s score. Every child’s position — from first to last. And at the very bottom of that list, where the column of names finally ended, was his.
He was last. In a class full of children who would go home that afternoon and play and eat and sleep, this boy had built himself a private classroom behind the snack bar, because the one inside had a wall that announced, to anyone who cared to look, that he was the least among them.
This is not the first of these stories. I fear, deeply, that it will not be the last — unless we find the courage, as educators, as administrators, and as a society, to confront what we are doing to our children in the name of academic transparency.
I have watched this ritual repeat itself across the basic schools of Ghana; the termly ceremony of the results board, the social media post, the ranked list that moves through WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages like a verdict read aloud in a public square. A number beside a child’s name that tells everyone — not just the child, not just the parents, not just the teacher, but the entire community — how that child performed relative to every other child in the class. It is a practice so embedded in our educational culture that its cruelty has become invisible. We have mistaken familiarity for wisdom, and tradition for truth.
The practice of publicly ranking and displaying students’ academic results in Ghana’s basic schools is one that I believe constitutes a profound institutional failure — a failure of empathy, of pedagogical understanding, and of ethical responsibility. It is a practice that must be confronted with urgency, seriousness, and the full weight of educational research.
What makes it particularly disturbing is the context in which it persists. The vast majority of these schools have no educational psychologist on staff. No trained counsellor. No structured wellbeing programme. A child devastated by a public ranking has nowhere to turn within the institution that wounded them. There is no professional to help contextualise their results, to rebuild their confidence, to sit with them behind the snack bar and say: you are more than this number. The school inflicts the wound and then walks away.
Academic results are tools of management and individual decision-making. They are not instruments of public spectacle. My argument in this opinion is that the public display of students’ termly results causes measurable and lasting psychological harm, undermines the principles of inclusive education, and must be replaced by the model already in use at Ghana’s tertiary institutions — where results are made available privately to each student through an individualised dashboard, seen only by those with the right and the responsibility to act on them.
The Psychological Wound of Public Ranking
The psychological consequences of publicly ranking children by academic performance are not speculative. They are well-documented, extensively studied, and deeply troubling. The moment a child’s position — 35th out of 35 — appears on a classroom wall or a Facebook post, something irreversible is set in motion. That child’s sense of self-worth, academic identity, and belonging is suddenly shaped by a single number, displayed without context, without compassion, and without recourse.
Covington (1992), in his seminal work on self-worth theory and student motivation, argued that students are fundamentally driven by the need to protect their self-esteem, particularly in academic settings. When academic failure is made public, students do not simply experience poor results — they experience an assault on their identity. Covington observed that the threat of public shame causes students to disengage from learning entirely, adopting self-protective strategies such as deliberate underperformance, learned helplessness, or complete withdrawal from academic engagement. These are not the responses of indifferent students; they are the coping mechanisms of children whose dignity has been stripped from them by a system that confuses transparency with accountability.
The work of Dweck (2006) on mindset theory is equally instructive. Dweck’s research demonstrated that children exposed to fixed-ability environments — environments where intelligence and performance are treated as permanent, publicly measurable traits — develop what she termed a “fixed mindset.” In such environments, failure is not an opportunity for growth; it is a public verdict. When a school posts rankings on social media, it announces to the world that some children are simply less than others, that their worth is proportional to their position on a list. This directly contradicts the growth mindset framework Dweck advocates as essential for lifelong learning and resilience.
Furthermore, effective feedback must be specific, timely, and directed at the individual learner. Research suggests that the most powerful feedback is formative and private, and should be aimed at closing the gap between current performance and desired goals. Public ranking does none of this. It provides no guidance. It offers no pathway. It simply announces hierarchy and leaves the children at the bottom to find their own way home.
The Social Media Dimension: Shame at Scale
The traditional practice of posting results on a classroom wall was harmful enough. But in this digital age, the consequences have been exponentially amplified. When a school posts a ranked results list on its Facebook page or WhatsApp community group, it is no longer speaking to the school compound alone — it is speaking to the world. A child’s academic standing becomes searchable, shareable, and permanent. The humiliation is no longer confined to a single afternoon; it becomes a fixture in the digital record of that child’s life.
Research by Valkenburg and Peter (2009), published in the Journal of Adolescence, found that children and adolescents who experience structured social comparison through digital platforms suffer significantly higher rates of anxiety and diminished self-esteem compared to peers who do not. The public academic ranking that schools post online is not merely harmful — it is a deliberate mechanism of psychological stratification, given institutional authority and broadcast to an unlimited audience.
I am particularly troubled by the permanence of it. A child posted as 38th out of 40 on the school’s Facebook page in Primary Four does not simply recover when the next term begins. That post may remain online for years. It may be seen by relatives, neighbours, and community members long after that child has grown. The digital footprint of public academic failure is a burden that no child — least of all a child still forming their identity — should be made to carry.
The Absence of Psychological Support: A Compounding Crisis
Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory reminds us that a child’s development is shaped not only by their immediate environment but by the interplay of multiple surrounding systems — the family, the school, the community, and the broader cultural context. When a school publicly humiliates a child without the structures to support recovery, it poisons multiple layers of the child’s ecosystem simultaneously. The family sees the public result and may respond with additional pressure at home. The community sees the social media post and treats the child differently. Surrounded on all sides by the consequences of a public ranking, the child has nowhere to retreat. The school, which should be a sanctuary of growth, has become a source of compounded harm instead.
The Ghana Education Service has, over the years, acknowledged the critical shortage of school counsellors in the country’s basic schools. Amoako (2014), in a study on guidance and counselling services in Ghanaian schools, found that the ratio of counsellors to students in basic schools was so disproportionate as to render professional support virtually inaccessible to the majority of pupils. Many schools rely entirely on untrained class teachers to provide emotional support — a reality that, while reflecting the dedication of those teachers, is wholly inadequate for children experiencing the complex psychological effects of academic shame and public failure.
The boy behind the snack bar had no counsellor to speak to. He had no psychologist. He had only four walls of a classroom he could not bear to enter, and a results sheet that told everyone who he was. That is the reality in which this practice operates, and it is a reality that demands an urgent reckoning.
Academic Motivation and the Erosion of the Love of Learning
Beyond the immediate psychological wounds, the public display of academic rankings fundamentally distorts a child’s relationship with learning itself. Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory posits that intrinsic motivation — the genuine desire to learn for the sake of learning — is nurtured when students experience autonomy, competence, and a sense of relatedness within their learning environment. Public rankings systematically undermine all three.
When a child’s academic worth is reduced to a publicly displayed number, they lose their sense of autonomy — the feeling that their efforts are self-directed and personally meaningful. Their sense of competence is replaced by the knowledge that they are in permanent competition, always potentially exposed. And their sense of relatedness — their feeling of belonging within the school community — is shattered the moment they see their name at the foot of a list published for the world to see. What remains is not curiosity. What remains is not wonder. What remains is fear. The particular, corrosive fear of a child who has learned that school is a place where you can be publicly diminished.
In their comprehensive review published in the American Psychologist, Ryan and Deci found robust evidence that environments relying on extrinsic, comparative, and performative evaluation erode intrinsic motivation over time. Motivation driven by the fear of public shame is not sustainable motivation. It is a form of coercion dressed in the language of pedagogy.
The Question of Privacy and the Rights of the Child
Academic results are personal data. They reflect the standing of an individual at a specific point in time, shaped by a complex web of factors — socioeconomic background, family stability, access to learning materials, health, nutrition, the quality of teaching received. To take this deeply personal, contextually complex data and post it publicly is not transparency. It is a violation.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989), to which Ghana is a signatory, enshrines in Article 16 the right of every child to protection from arbitrary interference with their privacy. Academic results, publicly displayed and shared without the child’s consent, constitute precisely such interference. The child has no say in whether their results are posted. They cannot opt out. They cannot contest the decision. They are simply exposed — as that nine-year-old boy was exposed, on a classroom wall, to the ridicule of his peers and the quiet devastation of his own self-image.
Results exist for two legitimate purposes: to inform the management decisions of educational administrators, and to empower individual students and their families to make informed choices about their learning journeys. They serve no constructive purpose when shared with the general public. They do not improve teaching. They do not inspire underperforming students. They do not strengthen the school community. They merely satisfy a cultural impulse toward comparison and ranking that, however deeply embedded in Ghanaian educational tradition, must now be critically examined and reformed.
What the Evidence Says About Ranking and Competition in Schools
The international educational research community has, for decades, been moving decisively away from competitive, ranking-based assessment systems. Finland, consistently among the world’s highest-performing educational systems, abolished school rankings and competitive grading in the early stages of basic education, preferring formative assessment systems that focus on individual growth and development (Sahlberg, 2011). The Finnish model recognises explicitly that competition among children in the early years of schooling is counterproductive to the goals of education.
Stiggins (2002), in an influential paper in the Phi Delta Kappan, drew a critical distinction between assessment of learning and assessment for learning. The public display of ranked results is, unmistakably, the former — a summative judgement rendered public. What schools should be pursuing is the latter: assessments that provide actionable, confidential feedback to students and their families, guiding future effort rather than cataloguing past failure. Stiggins argued that when assessment information is used punitively or publicly, it loses its educational value entirely and becomes merely an instrument of social control.
Black and Wiliam (1998), in their foundational review Inside the Black Box, similarly demonstrated that assessment practices focused on comparison and ranking damage student motivation, particularly for low-achieving students, who are most vulnerable to competitive evaluation. The children who most need encouragement are the children most damaged by public exposure of poor performance. This is not a peripheral finding. It is a central truth about the relationship between assessment, motivation, and educational equity.
The Tertiary Model: A Blueprint for Dignity
It is telling that the very Ghanaian educational system that exposes basic school children’s results on classroom walls and social media operates its tertiary institutions very differently. Universities make academic results available privately to individual students through dedicated portals and dashboards. No results are posted publicly. No rankings are shared on social media. A student at the University of Ghana logs into their personal account, accesses their results, and processes that information in private — with the opportunity to seek guidance from academic advisors, family, or counsellors before any public discussion occurs.
I argue, without reservation, that this model must be adopted in Ghana’s basic schools. The argument that basic school pupils are too young for digital dashboards is not sufficient justification for the continued public exposure of their results. Where technological infrastructure is limited, results can simply be delivered in sealed envelopes or communicated directly to parents and guardians in confidence. The technology is not the point. The principle is the point: academic results belong to the individual, not to the public.
If tertiary institutions have concluded — rightly — that the private communication of results respects the dignity and privacy of their students, why do we not extend the same respect to eight-year-olds and twelve-year-olds? Is the dignity of a child in Primary Three less worthy of protection than the dignity of a university sophomore? The answer must be an unequivocal no. If anything, young children, still in the formative stages of developing their academic identities and emotional resilience, deserve greater protection from the psychological hazards of public academic exposure — not less.
A Call to Ghana Education Service and School Leadership
The Ghana Education Service must issue clear and enforceable guidelines prohibiting the public display of individually ranked academic results, whether on physical notice boards, classroom walls, or digital platforms. School leadership must understand that the practice they have inherited — the termly results board, the social media post — is not a neutral tradition. It is a practice with measurable, documented consequences for the psychological wellbeing of children in their care.
The argument for public ranking often rests on the assumption that competition motivates students. This argument has been comprehensively debunked. Ames (1992), in her foundational work on achievement goal theory published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, demonstrated that classroom climates oriented toward performance and comparison — as opposed to mastery and individual improvement — produce lower quality learning, increased anxiety, and diminished engagement over time. Motivation driven by the fear of public shame is not sustainable. It is coercion masquerading as pedagogy.
Moreover, the practice disproportionately affects children from disadvantaged backgrounds. A child ranked last may have performed poorly not because of a lack of effort or ability, but because they could not afford textbooks, or there was illness at home, or they are among the many Ghanaian children who arrive at school on an empty stomach. To take a child in those circumstances and post their ranking publicly is not accountability. It is institutional cruelty. The school, which has failed to adequately support that child, escapes scrutiny — while the child bears the public weight of a failure the system itself helped produce.
Conclusion: Results Are Not Public Property
I still think about that boy behind the snack bar. The way his hands held his chin. The way he walked beside me back to the classroom — quietly, reluctantly, like someone returning to the scene of something they would rather forget. I think about the moment he stepped through the door and the other children looked up. I think about the wall, and the list, and his name at the bottom of it.
He was nine years old, and a piece of paper on a wall had already begun the work of convincing him that he did not belong.
Academic results are, at their core, data. They are useful — profoundly useful — for informing the decisions of school management, for guiding the interventions of teachers, and for empowering individual students and their families to understand where support is needed and how progress can be made. They serve all of these purposes best when communicated privately, thoughtfully, and with the accompanying support and context that allow the information to be used constructively.
They serve none of these purposes when broadcast to the world. A results list on a classroom wall or a school Facebook page does not improve teaching quality. It does not increase the availability of learning resources. It does not address the structural inequalities that drive academic underperformance. It does not sit with a child behind a snack bar and tell him that he is more than his position on a list. It simply exposes him — a nine-year-old boy, still soft with the possibility of what he might yet become — to a world that has already begun to measure him and found him wanting.
The practice of publicly ranking and displaying students’ results in Ghana’s basic schools is educationally indefensible, psychologically harmful, ethically questionable, and inconsistent with the rights of the child. It is time for basic schools to learn from the model their own tertiary institutions have already embraced — a model where results are personal, private, and shared only with those who have the right and the responsibility to act on them. The notice board must come down. The social media post must stop. The dignity of every child demands nothing less.
***
The author, Emmanuel Kwesi Gyetuah (Jet Alan), is a writer/lecturer and can be reached via: jet.alancash41@gmail.com
DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.
DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.
Source: www.myjoyonline.com
