GES Announces Date for Exam for Primary Four Students Nationwide. Excuse Me!

Oh Lordy! Our issues have nothing to do with testing and testing. Our issues have a lot to do with lack of being creative enough to creative jobs down the road for our unemployed college graduates. With that in mind, we should get rid of measuring students prowess only through exams. There is a need to teach entrepreneurship, superb customer- service and time- management skills, integrity, credibility and other business enhancing skills in our school system; to prepare our students for the new world socioeconomic order, instead of putting primary four students into unnecessary stress to massage our own inflated ego.

The truth must be told. A nation that depends religiously on natural resources and religious economy shouldn't gamble with the future of its human resources.

A quick quiz for our 'book-worms' out there. What is the main export of Saudi Arabia and Dubai? If you answered 'oil' you're totally wrong. The fact of the matter is that they both depend religiously on 'tourism'. The revenue generated from an annual pilgrimage alone is more than the oil revenue. Dubai, with the population of three million people had twelve million visitors in 2019.

The essence of these statistics is to highlight on the importance of tourism as an alternative to natural resources. And the need to train our students to focus on that aspect of the economy.

One more fact that is impacting on our students negatively is the auctioning off our airwaves to the highest bidders. Turn on your television right now and the chances are you will see the televangelists, one-man church pastors, Sika- Gari practitioners and lottery forecasters. Imagine if 1/3 of these channels is used to broadcast very educative and business -friendly materials to prepare our students to face the real new economic order.

What about our local information centers? Tweaaaa, don't even go there!. With the pretence to sell their sun-tanned and herbal medicine with expired dates, they broadcast sexually-explicit materials to assault the eardrums of our teenagers during odd hours. Now we wonder why there were so many teenage pregnant candidates at the recent BECE exam centers across the nation.

The chicken is indeed coming home to roost. And no one seems to care. With all our gold-plated degrees and PHDs behind our names can't we give our future leaders a secured future of their own and a reason to be optimistic? What is our defining moment?

Stay Tuned. Be blessed, educated, and informed. Kwaku Adu-Gyamfi.

*The author is a social commentator and a die-hard concerned citizen (not a spectator) of this great nation.