Educationist Anis Haffar says Ghana’s education system churns out “lazy infantalised helpless graduates”.
According to him, the way teaching is done in the Universities is a major contributory factor.
“The mode of teaching through lecturing is passé; it’s creating laziness”, he said on QUALITY EDUCATION on the XYZ Breakfast Show.
According to him, “go to any school in this country, people are just sitting [and] waiting to be told what to do and so on but the things that really would move people forward, all of that is missing from the curriculum so that we become, in a way, lazy because we sit”.
“Our education is premised on the fact that we are going to sit behind a desk, listen to lectures and come out and you get employed in somebody’s office and you continue to sit behind desks. We are grooming a generation of people who sit but they are not motivated to do things. In the process, we become lazy, because the laziness starts from day one…there’s a whole stream of a lazy mentality in this country”.
Mr Haffar said it is high time things are changed radically to make graduates active problem solvers rather than passive lazy onlookers.
“We need a complete shift in terms of the way we think; in terms of the way we bring up young people”, he suggested.
“Where will be the confidence of a young person who has passed through junior high school, senior high school, the University [and] he comes home and he’s redundant; there’s nothing he can do. What has education prepared for that individual at that time? What they’ve done is that they’ve developed what we call ‘learned helplessness’ in that individual. In other words, you’ve learned to be helpless because there’s nothing you can do with all the years that you’ve spent in school”.
Mr Haffar said it is only by shedding off the laziness in Ghana’s education system that the country can produce productive graduates.
“…Look at the movers and shakers in the world; they are not sitters, they are doers and many times I feel sorry for our young people because we are bringing them up to think that somebody owes them a living. That is very dangerous”, he warned.
