Editorial (Daily Searchlight of Thursday,, 30th June, 2022)
Mr Pious Yaw Osei, the Headmaster in charge of Academic at Ebenezer Senior High School, says stalled projects at the school need to be completed to enhance teaching and learning.
He said the school had about three projects, including a girls’ dormitory, a science laboratory and a seven-unit classroom block that had stalled at various stages of completion.
Mr Osei, in an interview with the press on the sidelines of the commissioning of six renovated classrooms of the school by the Padua North America Association, said the girls’ dormitory, which is about eighty-five per cent complete, started in 2008 while the science laboratory started in 2016.
‘‘The school is now soliciting from individuals who could donate doors and louvre blades to fix the windows,’’ he said.
The Assistant Headmaster said the school lacked adequate classrooms hence the need for the completion of the seven-unit classrooms.
He said many people were surprised that the school had not been made a boarding school because it had been in existence for almost eighty years, adding that it had boarding facilities when it was moved from its previous location.
The Daily Searchlight continues to advocate that Ghana needs a complete rethink of its educational policy in as far as funding and management of education is concerned.
The government of Ghana currently provides education at the basic and second cycle institutions for free. This means that a very substantial part of the education budget goes into the provision of recurrent items like books, feeding, staff, and other ancillaries, to the disadvantage of the provision of infrastructure.
We believe that the gap that is thus created, can be bridged if parents would be allowed a greater responsibility and participation in the payment of the recurrent expenditures.
Whilst we believe that government intends to provide universal education, we also believe that where parents can afford to do the needful, they ought to be given the advantage. This would save critical funds for investment into infrastructure, and quality.
Many people lament, for instance, that the quality of education provided at government basic schools leaves much to be said for it. With millions of pupils participating, this is likely to have major deleterious effects on the development of the human resource of the country. At the same time, the charging of even token fees, would bring hundreds of millions of cedis into the kitty, which can go to creating better staff conditions, quality education, and greater infrastructure.
Secondly, we have stated on this page before, and we must reiterate again, that the entire policy of direct state control of so many state-owned facilities, is likely to lead to low standards across board. Government should there give greater autonomy to the boards and management of these institutions to deploy greater business and educational sense into the management of these institutions.
With greater autonomy, would develop better standards, which government can then guide towards the expectations of the State to produce quality human resource.
The situation we have today, where we pretend to teach these young ones, with the mere aim of facilitating them through the halls of education and onto the unemployment heap, would never take this nation out of its developmental quagmire.
(This article was first published in the column EDITORIAL of the Daily Searchlight of Thursday,, 30th June, 2022. The Daily Searchlight appears on the newsstands of Ghana every working day and PDF versions are available for sale online twenty-four hours a day all day throughout the world on www.ghananewsstand.com).
