Is education about getting a diploma or degree?

Do we really understand the concept of “education” as a people? Is it paper education or proper education that we are looking at? It is my desire that write-ups of this sort reach the stakeholders behind the structuring of our educational system.

If our kind of education produces rich or successful people, then we should be a very rich continent here in Africa.

In 2015, the President of the Central University College, Professor Kwesi Yankah, predicted that Ghana’s graduate unemployment was likely to increase from the existing 200,000 to 271,000. I cannot tell what it looks like at this very moment. 

I am told one of our African presidents is the most educated among the Presidents of the world and I am sure the reaction should be, "and so what?" How has Zimbabwe benefited from the several bachelor’s and master’s degrees possessed by their President? Is that the reason for their insurmountable inflation?

If the definitions I found in the dictionary are anything to go by, then please let us answer the following;

Where are the skills, knowledge, values, beliefs, habits and the likes? We seem to dish out papers, not knowledge and skills. Let us ensure that measures are put in place for students to acquire these values at all cost.

I once heard the story of a young Japanese man who travelled to America to study and he was so much into creativity that he rather spent time at the assembling plants studying what was done there. It didn’t take long for the school authorities to serve him a dismissal letter for his inconsistency in class but he gladly thanked them for helping him graduate on time and travelled back home to start producing machines.

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As much as the certificates are legal documentation that gazette students as graduates, we should graduate them with something that can put them in the global market with ease. What is the use of an agricultural degree if you can make no contribution to the agricultural sector?

Let us fix our educational machinery, it is just not functioning well.
And to every graduate: if all you have is a certificate, then please educate yourself again.