State of Ghana’s educational system destroys creativity?

An educational consultant, Mr Anis Haffar, has described Ghana’s educational system as one that does not encourage productivity and creativity but rather destroys creativity in students.

He explains that when teaching and learning are based on rote learning (‘chew and pour’), it only trains people to look back at what somebody else has discovered instead of thinking to discover things for themselves.

Mr Haffar, speaking on the weekly motivational programme, the Springboard on Joy FM, observed that it was crucial for the country to revise its current educational system to meet the trend of time instead of the ‘chew, pour and forget’ syndrome.

He said Ghana’s educational system has over the years placed much premium on the system of memorisation and has become an impediment for people to be productive.

“What has happened to the world presently are people who have taken over themselves to do great things. I’m talking about Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and so on who are not ‘chew-pour’ individuals. Things are changing so we must also change as a country”, he said in a contribution to the programme hosted by Reverend Albert Ocran, a pastor, entrepreneur, author and public speaker.

Mr Haffar was speaking for the motion, “Our current educational system destroys talents’’, in the October 16 edition of the radio seminar which is cast in a debate format.

It was the third edition in a new series “Pros & Cons”, aimed at analysing leadership and human interest issues from different perspectives.

Learning from others 

With copious examples, the astute educationist noted that in most advanced countries, the focus of education was not basically on academics but rather on projects young students would be guided to undertake.

He said such creative activities or projects undertaken by those young students were exhibited at the end of the year for entrepreneurs, academia and policy makers to interact and question them about their projects.

“Now what that does is that it promotes talent, creativity and the issue is that at the end of the year, these young ones will begin to realise that education depends on him or herself as an individual”, he explained.

Contrary to that, the saddest phenomenon about Ghana’s educational system was that people were made to sit for 16 years of their lives just to memorise others’ thoughts and reproduce them at the end of the day, he bemoaned.

“For me, what I think is that we are destroying our youth because our human capacity is not being developed at the level where we can begin to add value to who we are and begin to develop confidence in our youth.”

The ideal thing was for the country’s educational structure to imbibe the culture of reading and writing properly into students in order for them to learn and be creative to face today’s competitive world.