Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum
The Minister-designate for Education, Dr. Yaw Osei Adutwum, has said barriers built in the education system are making the country’s education irrelevant.
According to him, if a Visual Arts student, who is deemed to be the most creative person, cannot be an engineer “then you know that you have built some barriers in front of your children.”
Responding to questions from the Appointments Committee of Parliament on Thursday, Dr. Adutwum said Ghana needed an education system that made provision for students to easily switch from a programme like sociology to engineering “to make the most creative person to be the one who is innovative to build the best bridges and all the kind of engineering works required to develop the country.”
“In education we deal with access, quality and relevance. Invariably, an area that has given a number of developing countries a lot of challenges is relevance,” he said, adding “If you look at what we are doing in Ghana in the field of engineering, a field that is in great demand, we have currently 36,000 students enrolled in engineering.”
Producing More
“So give and take, we have about 9,000 that graduate annually. Appropriation is 31 million approximately and if you compare that to a country like Vietnam with a 90 million population, we are producing 9,000 engineers and they are producing 100,000 engineers every year,” he revealed.
“This is the reason Samsung is building the largest manufacturing hub in Vietnam. So relevance (of education) is very important. But we have built some barriers in our education system and when you visit schools, invariably headmasters will tell you these are Visual Arts students,” he said.
According to him, by implication “they (Visual Arts students) are not the smartest people in the school. But I always say to myself, ‘you are telling me that your most creative child who can draw you is not the smartest.’”
He said “that means that we really put a barrier. If your most creative person who can draw cannot be an engineer then you know that you have built some barriers in front of your children.”
Broadening Skills
He said that was why they had begun a programme to broaden the array and the skills set that students were supposed to have, and therefore improve the soft skill of communication of creativity, critical thinking and collaboration.
“And once you are able to inculcate in the students the soft skills, then it will be easier for them to move from sociology to software engineering,” he stated.
He asked rhetorically, “Who is the best to develop our software for us? It is engineers, and not sociologists? But the barrier that we mostly erect is what is preventing us from making our education system relevant to the needs of this country.”
Covid-19 & Schooling
On the issue of schools reopening in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Education Minister-designate said the call for the immediate closure of schools was premature, adding that he would only sanction the closure of schools when infection statistics demanded so.
According to him, to the extent that the schools can be a safer environment than the home and the community in which they live and the schools are made clean and PPE are supplied coupled with strict adherence to the protocols, the schools should remain open.
“That is why teachers are being trained so that the protocols become second nature to the students, ensuring that there’s a lesson unit that is taught about disease spread in reference to Covid-19.
“These are critical issues and also ensuring that the new taskforce that we are developing for schools include an opportunity for timely reporting of places where there is a suspected case,” he submitted.
Dr. Adutwum said if they are unable to ensure that the school environment is made safe then it would make sense to close down schools.
University Bill
On the Public University Bill, Dr. Adutwuma indicated that he would hold dialogue with the leadership of the various universities to bring finality to the debate on the bill.
“Changes were made in various sections of the Public University Bill, which the universities and the outgone Education Minister had some dialogue on. So when I become the minister, I will continue the dialogue and bring finality to it, so that we can all move on and ensure that universities perform their rightful roles in the socioeconomic transformation of our country,” he noted.
By Ernest Kofi Adu