Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh
Minister of Education, Dr. Matthew Opoku Prempeh, has advised parents who are insistent on paying the school fees of their children at the senior high schools under the Free SHS policy to consider enrolling their wards at private senior high schools in the country.
He described attempts by a section of the Ghanaian public to get government to allow well-to-do parents to pay the fees of their ward in the public SHS as a subtle attempt to deny poor students access to the ‘elite schools’ in the country.
Dr. Prempeh explained that the private educational sector at the primary and junior high level have always been made up of children from good homes due to the quality of tuition it renders while the public schools have been reserved for mostly the poor who form the masses.
At the senior high level where the public schools are better, the voice of the middle and high class, he indicated, should not be allowed to overshadow the voice of the poor in the Ghanaian society who equally deserve better opportunity to attend the best schools in the country.
“When we did the Free SHS, we all of a sudden heard the voice of the middle and high class in the country; let our children pay and go. Two years down the line, they haven’t been to their schools to donate a thousand cedis for cleaning. That we can pay was to say we don’t want the poor kids in our elite schools. After all, you took your child to nine years of private school, why don’t you continue in SHS? You want to go and take the public child’s place in the only few best schools that we have,” he said.
Dr. Prempeh was speaking at on the theme: ‘World-Class Education, An Imperative For The Next Generation of Leaders’ at the first edition of the Danquah Institute Leadership Series, which was held in Accra on Friday, February 8, 2019.
He indicated that the situation where top schools in the country are populated by children of the elite in the society is detrimental to the quest of creating equal educational opportunity which would inspire the poor and also bridge the social gap.
“When they pick arms and guns, they will come to my house and whatever I have left for my soon, they will kill and maim,” he added.
Dr. Prempeh said a world-class education should be able to nurture children to become leaders who would be team players, innovators, critical thinkers and be able to solve complex problems.
By Issah Mohammed