Youth need functional education (education page)

30-01-2009

THE Founder of Gifted And Talented Education (GATE), an educational non-governmental organisation, Mr Anis Haffar, has said that effective measures should be applied for providing functional education to the Ghanaian youth to make them useful to society.
Mr Haffar complained that Ghanaian students spent too much time behind their desks without doing anything practical work to improve their lot and that of the community.
He told the Daily Graphic in Accra that the period a person spends in school should not be an issue but rather the availability of quality education which could help develop the society.
Mr Haffar, whose organisation deals in teacher in-service training, said much had been said about the length of time needed to complete this or that education programme. The important thing is to take meaningful steps to get the right materials for teaching and learning at all times.
He said the ideal situation was for the government to take into consideration the need to provide adequate materials and the needed human resource, when it introduced the four-year educational programme and said if three years would be used and used profitably, then so be it.
It is good to change the programme to three years if that was what the nation could afford, he stated.
Mr Haffar noted that it was frustrating when an unemployed youth was unable to say specifically what he would do and only tell a prospective employer that he will do whatever he was asked to do.
That statement, he pointed out, was not encouraging and wondered how anybody could employ a person who had no practical training and might not be able to add value to an organisation when employed.
He said his experiences in the communities had revealed that a lot of talents abound in the Ghanaian youth and said what was important was the necessary push to be given them and they would do great things.
Mr Haffar stressed the need to make students spend less time behind their desks but rather move to the communities to learn how to use their hands to do things.
He advised that educational issues should not be politicised but the best education be provided for the Ghanaian child who had talents just like any child elsewhere and even better in some instances.
The youth should be helped to develop usable skills as soon as possible, and those skills should add value to every community they find themselves in,he stressed.