8th Catholic Education week held
This year’s Catholic Education Week Celebration in the Upper West Region has been marked in Wa with a call on the various stakeholders in education, especially parents, to see the care of their children as a vocation.
This is to enable the children to get the best attention and values to ensure that they grow up into responsible adults.
Advertisement
The Regional Manageress of the Catholic Education Unit, Mrs Loenicia Langkpier, made the call at a durbar of teachers and parents to climax the eighth Catholic Education.
Climax
The four-day celebration was on the theme: “Catholic Education: Enhancing the potentials of pupils and students.”
Activities organised to highlight the celebration included a route-march through the principal streets, cultural display, health talks, games and durbar.
Mrs Langkpier expressed regret that some parents were neglecting their moral duty of catering for their children, resulting in the upsurge of youth vices such as drug abuse, school dropouts and teenage pregnancies.
Performance
Mrs Langkpier asked them to critically look at the situation where female pupils and students performed very well in the early stages of education but “this dwindles as they climb up the educational ladder leading to a drop in their population as well”.
She, therefore, appealed to parents to set goals for their children and assist the teachers to inculcate moral principles and discipline in them.
Role of Catholic Church
The manageress said at the moment the unit had a total of 468 basic schools in the region made up of 156 Kindergartens, 176 primary and 136 junior high schools with a total enrolment of 75,018 pupils and students as well as over 3,000 teachers.
Apart from this, they can also boast of the establishment of excellent senior high schools and vocational/technical schools whose products were contributing their quota to the socio-economic development of the country.
Mrs Langkpier paid glowing tribute to the late Peter Cardinal Dery who established the Catholic Education Unit Office in 1960.
The Chaplain of the St Francis Xavier Minor Seminary, Wa, Rev. Fr Nicodemus Nongnenuor, underscored the importance of Catholic education which sought to unearth the potentials of the children.
He appealed to teachers to relate positively with the young children in their care to make them feel comfortable so that they would be happy to stay at school.