If you want to know whether a country truly believes in the promises in its Constitution, the place to start is not Parliament or the courts. It is the classroom.
Schools reveal a nation’s instincts with remarkable honesty. They are the small republics where rules operate without ceremony, where power is exercised without speeches, and where children discover whether authority intends to empower them, or simply contain them.
It is in one of these republics, Wesley Girls’ High School, that Ghana now faces a constitutional test with wide implications: can a school that is publicly supported require every student to live as though they belong to one faith?
Wesley Girls has, for generations, maintained a firm Methodist character. Chapel is compulsory. Islamic prayer is not allowed. Hijabs are barred. Fasting during Ramadan is prohibited. These are not vestiges of a bygone tradition; they are the living structure of school life.
The Supreme Court must now determine whether these practices are compatible with the Constitution.
This case is not a quarrel about where to put prayer mats. It is a confrontation between two visions of what the Constitution protects: the individual dignity that Jack Donnelly describes as the foundation of human rights, and the communitarian belief that institutions may enforce a shared identity for the sake of discipline and unity. When these ideas collide, the courtroom becomes the arena where a society decides how it treats those who stand in the minority.
The Claim:
The challenge to Wesley Girls is grounded in a straightforward principle: human rights belong to people because they are human, not because they belong to a particular school, religion, or institution. They do not evaporate when a student crosses a compound. They travel with her.
A Muslim student walking onto campus does not become a blank page waiting to be rewritten. She arrives as a person entitled to manifest her religion, in dress, prayer, and observance. The Constitution says so plainly. It protects not only belief but the expression of belief. A right that exists only in private is not a right at all.
Stopping a student from praying, wearing a hijab, or fasting during Ramadan is not a matter of school management. It strikes at what Donnelly calls the minimum conditions for a dignified life. When a student must hide her faith to fit in, the harm is not administrative, it is personal.
Equality strengthens this further. A rule that appears neutral, such as banning all headgear, may still be discriminatory if it disproportionately burdens one group. The Constitution cares about the effect of the rule, not the neatness of its wording.
And Ghana’s secular character is decisive: a public-supported institution cannot compel students to take part in worship in a faith they do not share. The state may organise classrooms, but it may not organise consciences.
The Response:
Wesley Girls, supported by the Attorney-General, offers a different narrative. In their view, the school is a carefully cultivated community whose Methodist roots are essential to its character. Asking the school to abandon those roots, they argue, risks dismantling the culture of discipline and academic excellence for which it is renowned.
This is the communitarian argument: institutions derive meaning from shared values, and those who join them understand the nature of the community they are entering. Uniformity is presented as cohesion rather than control.
The school also leans on a basic truth: no right is absolute. Boarding houses require order. Too many overlapping religious practices, they argue, may disrupt routine and supervision. The intention, they insist, is not to suppress belief but to manage a complex environment.
The reasoning resembles the European idea of a “margin of appreciation,” where institutions are sometimes given leeway to balance competing considerations.
But Donnelly warns that tradition and institutional identity can easily mask exclusion. Cultural justifications, he notes, often become the language through which power explains itself.
His question remains uncomfortable: what happens when an institution’s self-definition requires individuals to suppress essential parts of themselves?
The human-rights answer is clear: institutions may be proud, but they may not be coercive.
The Real Contest: Two Understandings of the Constitution
Beneath the legal filings lie two different understandings of what the Constitution is for.
One sees the Constitution as a shield for the individual. Under this view, a student enters a school carrying rights that cannot be bargained away or trimmed to fit an institutional preference.
The other sees the Constitution as a framework that allows institutions to preserve their coherence. Rights exist, but always in conversation with tradition, order, and identity.
The Court must choose which view governs Ghana’s public education system.
What Other Countries Have Learned
Courts in other countries have confronted similar disputes. South Africa requires schools to reasonably accommodate religious practices that do not disrupt learning. Nigeria protects the wearing of the hijab. Kenya, by contrast, upheld a school’s right to prohibit it, a decision widely criticised.
The broader global movement points in one direction: mature constitutional orders favour accommodation, not compulsion.
The Institutional Choice Ahead
Institutions can either widen the space for belonging or narrow it. A rule that tells students, “You may attend, but you must quiet the parts of yourself we do not recognise,” belongs firmly in the latter category.
Donnelly writes that human rights exist so that individuals meet authority with dignity intact. Any rule that undermines that dignity must be viewed with suspicion.
What the Supreme Court Must Resolve
The Court faces three questions that will shape the future of public education in Ghana:
- Do students carry their religious rights with them into school?
- Can a public-supported institution compel participation in religious practices?
- May a school that draws from the public purse privilege one religious identity above all others?
If the Court answers in favour of rights, Wesley Girls can preserve its Christian heritage, but without enforcing it. The hymns may continue. The compulsion must stop.
If the Court goes the other way, it risks creating pockets of public life where the Constitution operates only partially.
The Classroom as the Republic’s Mirror
Constitutions do not fail on paper. They fail when they stop shaping the institutions that govern everyday life. And few institutions shape citizens as powerfully as schools.
The Wesley Girls case is a test, not of religion, but of the Republic’s integrity. It offers the Court an opportunity to affirm that tradition enriches public life but does not control it, and that no child must choose between her God and her education.
For a country committed to dignity, equality, and pluralism, that is not a lofty ideal.
It is the only consistent position the Constitution allows.
