Ghana's timid education system is producing timid professionals- Anis Haffar suggests

Ghana and Africa are in short supply of quality technocrats due to the poor educational structure which tend to underestimate the potentials of children.

If Ghana really wants to move to the class of the developed countries, then stakeholders ought to revisit and repackage the country’s education system, educationist Anis Haffar has advised.

“It is in our interest that best education happens to our people,” he counselled as pressure group Occupy Ghana marks one year of active campaign to correct societal wrongs dubbed the “Journey is the Destination”.

Showing some touching and riveting videos that captured the competencies of the Ghanaian child, Anis Haffar charged that the time to invest in developing children’s cognitive ability is now.

"There is a tendency in Africa and right here in Ghana to underestimate the potential of the human resources in this country…we have been independent since 1957 and up to today, we don’t have enough doctors, nurses, teachers.

“We have to begin to think where this country is going in the future without these people who move societies”.

About 50 percent of children who take part in the Basic Education Certificate Examination fail, but the decades old shambolic trend has not pricked stakeholders to rethink their approach, he observed.

Not all children are cut out to be academicians, the experienced educationist submitted. Some would have to use their hands to get to the next level, he weighed into the country’s overreliance on written examination for assessment.

He admonished the examination council to provide children who are not gifted in reading and writing, an option to pass their exams using their hands to do what they are fond of doing.

Anis Haffar, who is an expert in the field of education, has a serious issue with the method of teaching in the country: pupils are consigned to memorising things instead of challenging them to think.

The system has left many to adopt the learning method of passing their exams with high marks but with little to show in practice.

He believes that instead of allowing pupils to sit in class for 16 years in their attempt to get education, innovative ways can be provided to get the students acquire practical learning.

“Imagine a kid in an elementary school who is sitting, he goes to junior high school, he is sitting; he goes to senior high school, he is sitting; now when he goes to the university, he is sitting to listen to lecturers. If you look at the trajectory of a person like that, they have been sitting for 16 years, and suddenly you release them into a ministry to go and perform, does that make sense to you?”

He called for a paradigm shift in education which reduces children to copying what the teacher writes to a more practical one that will challenge and catapult them to achieve successes that will make Ghana a first world country.