Educationist, Nii Armah Addy has advised government to devise a national development plan to restructure the digitalisation goal of the nation in the field of academia.
He was speaking on Campus Exclusive on the score of challenges and flaws in Ghana’s digitalisation drive in the educational sector.
Teachers have been aggrieving over the ‘one teacher one laptop’ policy, with some teachers complaining of no receipt, as stakeholders across the country have had negative views of the Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia’s initiative to replace Senior High School textbooks with laptops.
According to Mr. Addy, one of the reasons such policies fail is due to government’s layout of development plans with no clear view of sustaining them.
He attributed this to government’s tendency to politically sloganeer the educational system which retards the growth of the sector.
On the show, he called for a sustainable development plan in education that would also ensure smooth transitions of development projects between changing governments.
“We need a national development plan where certain things are so paramount to the development of this country that they do not change even with succeeding governments. Because governments assume power with manifesto promises, they then tend to do what they’ve told the people they will do. And even that, you can be assured that they don’t do most of the things they say they will do.”
He believed that a national development plan would have prevented the challenges that are being faced on implementing innovative education programs.
“So that as I said, if there has been a national development plan, and that agenda has been couched in a national plan, we wouldn’t have fallen back with our education programs and be where we are now.”
He went on to bewail the regress that is caused in education by what he called ‘the politics of education’.
“The politics of education takes us one step back, one step forward, which is leaves us standing at the same place; we are not making the levels of progress that we’re supposed to make in order to see a speedy development in IT -aided education programs.”
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Story by | Fafa Melody Kportufe | univers.ug.edu.gh
