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23.09.2014 Editorial

Behold The Cliffhanger!

By Daily Guide
Behold The Cliffhanger!
23.09.2014 LISTEN

Parents and candidates are anxious as the outcome of the school placement exercise is yet to be released. Ordinarily, parents and their kids should not have been apprehensive about the outcome of the exercise, having made their choices already and trusting that all will be well.

Unfortunately, in a system where such exercises are infected with human interference, there is genuine cause for them to be worried about the possibility that their children might not have their preferences.

It is such anxiety which breeds the unnecessary corruption usually witnessed around this season. We recall why the current computer placement system was adopted to eliminate the human interference. With the passage of time however, it has been proven to be ineffective in obviating this nightmare it was intended to eliminate.

We wish that parents would be spared the agony of going back and forth in search of persons with the appropriate influence to ensure that their anxious children are placed in schools of their choices.

For those with no connection, they would have to manage with fate and look on helplessly as their children – qualified though for the schools they chose – are denied same.

We are also in the know about how the so-called top schools are the choices of school children and the undue pressure they bring to bear upon their parents to ensure that they get same.

It is our prayer that in due course every region or even district would be endowed with schools wielding the status of those that many scramble to be admitted into.

In all these, we entreat the authorities to unearth alternative means of easing the nightmare that parents must endure during such seasons.

We think that if we take another look at the shortcomings of the system as it stands, better ways of managing admissions could be unearthed.

We have even heard suggestions that the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) be scrapped and replaced with an alternative which would rely on the assessment of individual teachers in the schools of the candidates.

That could be a wonderful concept. It would however, need efforts to determine its suitability so that we do not end up replacing a nightmare with a worse option.

We are not oblivious of how the pressure of the examination hall has sometimes denied the children at their ages to put up their best under the circumstances. Be it as it may, they would at one stage or the other be confronted with the reality of public examination in their academic life, but perhaps not immediately after their Junior High School (JHS) stage. Just a thought anyway.

 
 
 

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