Education Matters with Anis Haffar - The pathways for quality education in Ghana - Some highlights from year 2012

The years fly. The new stirs up memories of the past. To make 2013 better still, the season invites the time and space to reflect, motivating the theme for this week. The following highlights were selected from the forty-one articles published in this column from January to December 2012:

The Rights of the Child
The UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) guaranteed: 1. The Rights of provision (adequate nutrition, health care, education, economic welfare); 2. Rights of protection (from abuse, neglect, violence, exploitation); and 3. Rights of participation (a voice in decisions affecting the child). Ghana ratified the UNCRC in February 1990, becoming the first country to do so.

The Youth Need Empathy
The quantum of youthful potential lost to the streets should make every grown person squirm. As they merge from childhood, young people need empathy and assurance; they call out to be believed in, validated, and supported unconditionally to succeed.

The Potential in Africa
Whoever says that our African youth cannot match the world’s best does not know what they are talking about! It’s all in how the youth are raised. And further, it boils down to how teachers, administrators and government officials develop themselves as professional educators to uplift this most important vocation on which great nations are built.

Human Resource
Human resource is like natural resources.  They are often buried deep. You have to go looking for them; they are not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves. And you might imagine that education would be the way that happens but too often it’s not.

BECE Results
There isn’t much difference in innate cognitive abilities between the sets of youngsters who pass and those that don’t. Had those who failed been adequately prepared, inspired and motivated by their instructors, they too would pass.

Supervision in Schools
Each school administrator needs to visualize a situation where every Teacher or a new Teacher has at his / her disposal, at anytime, a set of prepared Schemes of Work, Teaching Materials, Lesson Notes, etc. Supervision itself will be improved in the process. Next year starts from today!

Talent Search
Talents exist where they are found, and from my experiences teaching in some international settings, Ghana has more than her fair share of innate gifts that must be rescued so they don’t atrophy or disappear unnoticed. The future of the country depends on our very own efforts and not much else.

Critical Thinking
The “higher level thinking order” consisted of especially designed activities that engage learners to think for themselves, question other people’s conclusions. In analyses, for example, the validity – even of sacrosanct views – are tested for the times or occasion, no matter how conventional or accepted they seemed to be.

The Affective Intelligence
Personal qualities such as poise, confidence, commitment, trust, values, and leadership potential invariably float to the top of key requirements. In a nutshell, the affective domain scouts for the individuals worthy of exemplary leadership roles.

Emotional Discipline
Emotional discipline, for example, is not something that adults just tell children. The relationship is both proactive and interactive; it is a two-pronged affair: model the best and expect a fruitful return. That is why quality leadership and continuous growth everywhere is so critical.

Continuous Education
The humility of the likes of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to accept that they themselves are chronic learners for progress is the clearest hint that education never stops; it continues for everybody – high and low.

The Power of the Subconscious Mind
There’s a method to dreams. The antidote to dreaming purposeless dreams, I suggest to participants, is to write down their to-do list, and read it aloud to themselves before they hit the sack. The read-aloud tends to relay the unfinished business, i.e. the to-do list – to the subconscious mind. Working round the clock, way into the depths of our snoring hours, the subconscious mind adds operational value (i.e. how to go about things) to the defined items on the list.

Wealth Creation
We seem to accept the falsity that wealth creation and jobs for the jobless graduates happen by themselves when no one is looking. The question begging for an answer is why Africa continues to be so poor in so many places, considering the vast possibilities – including human, land and fabulous mineral resources!

Peace in Ghana
In a country so blessed with peace, why allow ourselves to be bombarded with grueling matches of political assaults and insidious verbal wars on the radio. And one may politely ask, is that how a nation chooses to use its energies to build and develop from sunrise to sunset?

    Email: [email protected]