LECTURER ADVOCATES REVIEW

THE National Co-ordinator of the Educational Quality Implementation Project (EdQual), Dr George K.T. Oduro, has called for a review of the practice of using teachers for official non-teaching and learning activities because that disrupts the process of child learning.
He said teachers should make optimum use of teaching and learning time to convince children of the need to stay in the classroom and study and bemoaned the fact that pupils and students were denied access to their teachers during national election years, for example.
Dr Oduro, who is also a lecturer at the University of Cape Coast Institute for Educational Planning and Administration (IEPA), made the call in an address on the occasion of the graduation and inauguration of a cadet corps at the Creator Schools.
“Should teachers continue to be made electoral officers, polling agents and registration officers at the expense of their pupils? With the upcoming National Identification Programme, will teachers be withdrawn from the classrooms to participate in this national exercise, at the expense of the children?” he quizzed.
He called on the Ghana Education Service (GES) to liaise with the Electoral Commission (EC) and all other stakeholders in child learning to seriously think about a means of controlling the extent to which such official non-teaching/learning activities tended to deprive children of their right to teaching and learning time utilisation.
Speaking on the theme, “Discipline and hard training: Pathway for a bright future”,Dr Oduro said in order for the young ones to be disciplined, there was the need to support schools to be disciplined in the utilisation of teaching-learning time.
He said it was necessary that heads of schools created congenial conditions for young people and provide avenues for their voices to be heard in matters that affected their development because in situations where children felt respected and their views considered in decision making, the foundation for discipline became stronger.
According to Dr Oduro, the school had a critical role to pay in the development of the child because developing the habit of discipline in young people largely depended on the training provided by the school.
“The school is responsible for developing the child morally, physically, intellectually, emotionally, socially and mentally. Yet we tend to give more preference to the intellectual dimension of the school’s mission, to the extent that examination results have become the sole formal criteria for assessing a good school,” he stated.
In so doing, he said, the moral, social and emotional dimensions of the child’s development, which were critical in the development of discipline, were relegated to the background, adding that the school system hardly rewarded good behaviour.
Dr Oduro said if discipline among children was to be promoted, then the school should be encouraged to adopt a holistic approach to child development and reward good behaviour, just as intellectual performance was rewarded.
He commended the staff and management of the Creator Schools for not focusing only on the intellectual development of the child.