The paper investigates the educational philosophy and practices of Achimota School, which was established in colonial Ghana in 1927 as the governmental model school of leadership education. Achimota's education aimed at developing the character of leader who is ‘western in the intellectual attitude, but remained African in sympathy’. To fulfil this objective, Achimota developed its curriculum according to the socio-cultural background of African students, while trying to provide the finest education available at the British Public Schools. The former part of the paper untangles the discourse in the process of defining ‘African tradition’ to be taught at Achimota. In fact, tradition was never a fixed set of activities, but diverse norms and practices of different ethnic groups which were constantly changing as practiced. By participating in the process of codifying “tradition” for Achimota, various groups of people such as colonial officials, missionaries, European educationists, traditional chiefs and African nationalists were involved in inventing a set of practices called “tradition”. The paper also reviews educational ideas which were popular in Europe and America of the period and seems to have become the philosophical stimulants of Achimota education. These includes: American progressive education, American black industrial education, and British Victorian moralism in education. Among them, in this paper, the author will focus on the influence of British Victorian moralism, especially that of Public Schools. Then, the last part describes the Achimota education experienced by students, which was a mixed product of two traditions-British public school tradition and ‘African tradition’. While the School tried to assimilate Africans to British Public School norms and European civilization, it also devoted a great deal of energy to adapt to the African ‘tradition’. Even so, what actually happened was the creation of new Achimota culture which picked essences from different ‘traditions’ and remoulded them.
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