Are Ghana’s public universities doing the best for the youth?
The prompt for this week’s title came from a recent Ghana News Agency (GNA) report headlined, “Unemployed Graduates Hit 271,000”. Professor Kwesi Yankah, president of the Central University College, was reported to have projected that the number of unemployed graduates would likely surge to 271,000 this year from the existing figure of 200,000.
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The prediction was made during the 11th graduation congregation of the Ghana Technology University. The president of the university, Dr Osei Darkwa, was also quoted to have expressed concern – that Saturday - over the country’s mounting unemployment situation and demanded academia to review their curricula with people in industry.
That realisation ought to prod the nation to pursue a renaissance in education to save the youth and the nation itself. Let’s reflect that 271,000 is not just a huge number. It consists of the nation’s youth with names and ambitions. Families, too, have great expectations for their brood, having inve
Meaningful education
Granted, education is only one input into the employment system and all the blame cannot be put onto one of the system’s inputs. But, the critical question is this: Are there ways in which education can help? Of course there are! The first thing to bear in mind is that functional, meaningful education is a key indicator of a person’s or nation’s upward economic mobility. Each person’s productivity adds to social progress. Show me a decrepit education system, and I will show you a country festering with poverty and diseases. A defunct education system is guaranteed to create joblessness, poverty, distress, and social problems.
These days, when universities advertise for student enrolment, they brag about the high placements into the professions and skills for employment. They brag about the individual attention and coaching by faculty that enhance opportunities for their graduates to branch out on their own as critical thinkers and problem solving entrepreneurs who, for good measure, are in a position to employ other people.
Sacrifices to fund education
For such laudable reasons, some parents borrow money or mortgage their houses; market women toil in the sun all day to give their wards the opportunities they themselves never had. Students expect to be skillful, and progressive nations inspire both the teachers and the youth to aspire to greatness. But if after all that education, the wards are now found plodding helplessly back home for those same parents to continue feeding and clothing them, isn’t something amiss? To say, then, that education is not a major solution to any nation’s development challenges is to live on a planet possessed with dementia.
When discrepancies in education are being discussed in radio and television interviews - I’m asked often, “Who do you blame?” The issue is not about naming and blaming. We have national problems in the design of our organisations across board in government establishments. Education – from the primary to the university levels - is one of the main ones. The blame is about structures, norms, and routines. For example, the culture of sitting and listening to long lectures are wasteful, and must stop. The nation needs doers, not talkers!
According to the management guru, Peter Drucker (1909 – 2005), we should be mindful of every organisation’s “ultimate purpose”, and ask the leaders of every organization a few provocative questions: One, What is your mission? Two, What should you stop doing? The third might be, What should you start doing?
To prevent organisations from evolving backwards into fossils, they have to endure in a world of constant changes. As part of his “Management By Objectives” notion, Drucker advised his clients that as the world changes, one’s objectives have to correspond accordingly by connecting with realities. In other words, update or perish! And for goodness sake, we dare not “perish” quality education for the nation’s youth.
Old fashioned curricula and methodologies
Ghana continues to be stuck in the decrepit Third World mode due to the over-emphasis on jointed archaic subject matter routine peculiar to academics type education. Old fashioned curricula and methodologies tend to be repressive without the reactionaries themselves knowing it; they teach docility and conformity in an age where we expect innovation and creativity in solving nation’s numerous problems. Proper school reform for a developing country must engage in consistent hands-on applications that enhance skills for adding value to Ghana’s enormous natural inputs and endowment.
I can feel God asking from Heaven: How on earth are people on their knees with wish lists of prosperity – begging and screaming all night, when they could sleep early, get up early, stand on their feet, and with determination and effort claim what is rightfully theirs? What else do they expect after the enormous mineral resources and agricultural inputs that are the envy of other less endowed nations?
The subject centred fragmented curricula must be replaced by curricular objectives that support a Maintenance Culture, Rain Harvesting, Landscaping, Fish Farming, Horticulture, Irrigation, Agricultural inputs for industry, Environment Protection, and so on, as specific skills. The learning tasks involved must be built on real-life needs.
Rather than be content with perpetual passivity, relevant educational curricula, for one, must strive to add value to the nation’s natural endowment and attempt, at least, to create inputs for industry. That means that theories must evolve into applications, into skills for products and services. We have to move beyond cognitive outcomes typical of grammar type education into the affective outcomes that draw on experiential learning, creativity, confidence, self-determination, and self-actualisation based on hands-on productive effort
