We must derive more benefits from annual New Year School

From humble beginnings at Komenda in the Central Region in 1949 as a voluntary work camp by a group of students of the Department of Extra-mural Studies (which later became the Institute of Adult Education (IAE) and is now the School of Continuing and Distance Education (SCDE)), University of Ghana, the annual New Year School has transmuted into an important adult education programme on the national calendar of events.

Back in 1949 when the annual event began, the objectives were: to enlist the co-operation of local people in practical, improvised self-help by means of a visible voluntary example and afford the students an opportunity to study the educational problems and get a whole community to understand their own needs, so that they will be prepared to do something about them.

The camp was also to enable the students to undertake a social survey as a useful means of discovering the facts as a basis for action and encourage the idea of voluntary vacation work by students.

From there, the New Year School has become an annual residential programme of about a week’s duration organised  usually during the last few days of December and the first three or four days in January, at which people from all walks of life meet to deliberate on topical issues of national and international interest.

The timing of the school is to enable workers who are potential participants to take advantage of the public holidays available during the Christmas and New Year festive season.

Indeed, the annual meetings have been beneficial to the country in terms of the rich discussions they have generated on various development issues in the country.

The many years of uninterrupted holding of the programme on various themes suggest that the New Year School seeks, among other things, to provide a platform for the dispassionate discussion of matters affecting the overall development of the country.

It also aims at encouraging consensus-building among people of diverse opinions and backgrounds and educating the public on important and topical national and international issues.

The Daily Graphic is very interested in the school’s attempt to provide a forum for the initiation of public policy and assess public opinion on pertinent issues in order to ensure good governance.

The piece we find missing, however, is the inability of the University of Ghana, which has organised the school for over six decades, to track participants to get to know how well they have implemented the new ideas gained each year.

We, therefore, find refreshing the pledge by the Dean of the SCDE, Prof. Michael Tagoe, that after this year’s school, which is on the theme: “Promoting national development through agricultural modernisation: The role of ICT”, the university would start tracking participants.

We believe that will be a more proactive way of reaping immense benefits from the annual school, instead of waiting for individual public servants who attend the school to use their discretion to implement some of the suggestions in their respective institutions.

We recommend that, as Prof. Tagoe stated, the sector ministries must pick up the ideas generated at the annual school and work to roll them out for the country to derive maximum benefits from them.