Experiment new ways of solving educational problems - Patrick Awuah charges government

The founder and president of Ashesi University, Dr Patrick Awuah has advised government to find new ways of solving the problems that have engulfed the country’s educational system

Speaking at the fourth edition of ‘Achimota Speak’, on the topic ‘Reengineering Education in Ghana’ the renowned educationist advised government to thread cautiously in dealing with the country’s education problem in order not to adopt knee-jerk solutions in confronting the issue.

He called on government to diversify the educational system and also experiment new ways of finding a panacea to the country’s educational problems.

Dr Awuah observed that the education system is the biggest and most complex system in Ghana hence requires the unified effort of both the government and the private sector.

He therefore called on government and private firms to join forces to rescue Ghana’s ailing education system.

“We need to approach this with a lot of humility because the challenge before us is big and very complex. To change a system like ours, we need to experiment new ways. We have to run some smaller experiments and find out which one is good and churns out the right result and then we scale the things that are working well quickly”.

“There are only two ways to achieve a scale, one is the government and the second is the market. Individual organizations cannot achieve the scale the country needs. All we need is a government system with money from taxes and the market. The market refers a lot of individual organistations, private entities etc etc”. Dr Awuah said

He further called on government to reduce the number of subjects that are tested are the basic education level since that will hasten the progression from the basic level to the High School level.

Achimota Speaks is a lecture with a panel discussion on matters of national interest with special focus on education