The Minister of Education, Haruna Iddrisu, has joined the public debate on whether it was time for senior high schools (SHS) to allow students to wear long hair on campus, especially if it was a natural hair.
But speaking at the Mawuli Senior High School’s 75th anniversary in the Volta Region on Saturday, October 25, the sector minister said the education authorities were not going to tolerate any long hair “today or tomorrow” and added the secondary school environment was not a place for a beauty contest.”
The public debate followed a video shared on social media last week, where a female form one student, with a seemingly distraught face, was seen crying while at a barber shop to cut her hair in preparation for her first year at the Yaa Asantewaa Senior High School at Tanoso in Kumasi.
She was wearing the Yaa Asantewaa SHS school uniform in the video. The mother of the girl had taken her to the barber shop for a haircut, after many years of keeping her natural hair long.
The barber filmed the process of the haircut, showing the before and the after, and shared it on social media.
Following that, the public debate on hair in SHS campus was reignited, especially on social media, radio and on television stations.
Graphic Online understands the father of the girl has since approached the barber and expressed disagreement with the decision to film and post the video on social media without parental consent and threatened to take the barber on for that act.
In 2021, a similar incident at the Achimota School in Accra about raster hair for some form one students generated a national debate.
Haruna Iddrisu’s reaction
Speaking at the Mawuli School anniversary on Saturday, which had the Director General of the Ghana Education Service in attendance, Mr Haruna Iddrisu said:
“There is an ongoing debate about hair cuts, and size and length of hair in secondary schools.’
“We will not tolerate it today or we will not tolerate it tomorrow, in so long as molding character.”
“If we give in to hair today, tomorrow it will be shoes, and the next day it will be the way they [students] dress.”
“Therefore, as part of our disciplinary measures, headmasters and GES, you are accordingly empowered to take full control of how students behave on your campuses.”
“So anybody who thinks that your child will walk into any institution of learning, as if that child, forgive my words, was to attend a beauty contest, the school environment will not for that purpose and not cut for that purpose and we will not tolerate that as an institution,” the minister stated..