Second Lady dialogues with students on right behaviour
The Second Lady, Mrs Matilda Amissah-Arthur, has charged students to commit to right behaviour as a lifetime of such commitment has rewards.
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Mrs Amissah-Arthur was interacting with some students of the Labone Senior High School when she launched three booklets published by the Sonlife Press Ltd, a local Christian-based printing press.
The first booklet, The Right Thing to Do! Courtesy and Etiquette, is authored by Mrs Paulina Kumah; the second booklet, The Sonlife Guide to Energy Conservation is by Sonlife Press, while the third booklet, Rainwater Harvesting, is authored by Dr Osmund Ansa-Asare.
Interaction with students
Departing from the usual course of book launches with formal speeches before the launch, Mrs Amissah-Arthur engaged the students in a dialogue on what right behaviour is.
Taking a passage from a page of ‘The Right Thing to Do! Courtesy and Etiquette’, she pointed out to them that money could not buy everything as wrongly perceived by some.
For instance, she said money could not buy the trust of anyone, as trust was as a result of confidence in a person’s right behaviour.
Questioning students on what integrity entailed, Mrs Amissah-Arthur promised a laptop each to two students who would provide the right responses.
She later increased the prize to three laptops for the three students who provided the right responses to her questions.
She commended the headmistress of the Labone SHS for the orderliness of the students and appealed to the Ministry of Education through the Deputy Minister in-charge of Tertiary, Mr Okudzeto Ablakwa, to provide the school with 20 desktop computers to support teaching and learning.
Commitments
The Deputy Minister, Mr Ablakwa, said the booklet, The Right Thing to Do! Courtesy and Etiquette, was timely.
That was because the ministry had been charged by the President to ensure production of material on courtesy and etiquette in the curriculum of pupils as a result of the complaints received about falling moral standards.
He said the ministry would be in discussions with the author on how to incorporate her work in the campaign to instil values and discipline in pupils.
“The ministry of education does not consider this material as supplementary reading or an addendum, but as a bed-rock in training professionals,” he said.
He emphasised the fact that without morals or values, the training of the best professionals would be in vain.
Mr Ablakwa commended Mrs Paulina Kumah’s contribution to efforts to instil standards in pupils who were faced with several distractions from mobile telephony gadgets and social media.
He also commended the headmistress of the school, Ms Kate Bannerman, for preventing the chaotic scenes that characterised most SHSs during admission of new students in September.
Mentoring
The author of The Right Thing to Do! Courtesy and Etiquette, Mrs Paulina Kumah, said the seed for writing the book was sown some forty years ago when Mrs Amissah-Arthur took herself and two others under her tutelage when they entered Mfanstiman Senior High School.
Thus, the books authored by herself, the Sonlife Press and Dr Ansa-Asare were mentoring materials for students.
Also, she added, the materials were also geared towards the entrepreneurial development of SHS students, particularly The Sonlife Guide to Energy Conservation and Rainwater Harvesting.
She expressed the hope that the materials would mentor students who would in turn impact others and expressed the hope that an enabling environment would be created for the production and distribution of the materials.
A former moderator of the Global Evangelical Church, the Rev. Dr Emmanuel K. Gbordzoe, who chaired the function, pointed out to the students that their discipline and comportment had won the admiration of the Second Lady, hence the offer of laptops and desktops.
“This means that doing the right thing would send you to places you have never dreamt of,” he told them.
Five hundred copies each of The Right Thing To Do! Courtesy and Etiquette were donated to the Labone SHS and the Labone Basic School, while the Labone SDA School had 300 copies.