A former lecturer of University of Ghana and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Prof. John Bright Kobla Aheto said Ghana’s education lacks quality but focuses only on quantity.
He said schools of today only take pride in how many people they are churning out without paying attention to the quality of their products.
“Everybody must go to school but the resources and facilities are not there and the focus on philosophy, quality, rigor and high academic standards is no longer there,” he said.
Prof. Aheto noted that lately, it has become very easy for anybody to qualify for university education, and the schools just want to churn out the people, but are not targeting quality.
He said schools are not determining what skills the various parts of the country actually need for development and what number of people with such skills are actually needed – and whether the people trained can compete with the best there is in the world.
As the Guest Speaker at the launch of a book titled, Sustaining Corporate Growth, Prof. Aheto said everyone needs to be educated “but that does not mean we should all think of becoming academicians but entrepreneurs as well.”
He also emphasized the special attention that must be given to technical and vocational education, saying that a country cannot be built without technicians.
“It is not everybody who goes to secondary school who will end up at a university and graduate to find a job, so technical and vocational education must be given the needed the attention’’ he stated.
“I am a Professor but when my car breaks down, I’ll need a mechanic to fix it because I cannot do anything about it. This shows how they are needed in the country,’’ he told Adom News.
The author of the book, Dr. Francis Kwadade-Cudjoe told Adom News he was inspired by the challenges facing the corporate world to write the book.
He said it would have been better for a businessman to give his money to charity than to invest it and not make profit.
“It would have been better to give your money to beggars and received gratitude for your generosity than to invest in an unprofitable venture,” he said.
Dr. Kwadade-Cudjoe says government cannot contain everybody in the public sector hence the need to pay attention to private businesses to cater for the overwhelming unemployed majority in the country.