Senior Lecturer and founding Head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Ghana, Dr. Elsie Effah Kaufmann reechoed the need for the reexamining of the Ghanaian Educational System.
According to her, the country’s educational system is more theory-based, hence, unable to bridge the gap between the job market and academia.
Stakeholders in the educational system have over the years lamented over the over-emphasis on theories rather than practicals.
Speaking in an interview on the KSM Show on Accra based Metro TV and monitored by UniversNews, the National Science and Maths Quiz mistress complained that the outputs of the current educational system were not able to relay the knowledge they had gained in the classrooms onto the practical field.
“I teach engineering students and the engineers are supposed to be the innovators, they are the ones supposed to be doing the wonderful things to see us develop, and year in, year out, I don’t know if we are achieving that objective because too many of our inputs, these are students from the high schools, including those who sit with me on stage, they are the best and the brightest and yet something is wrong because they are not able to translate all those theories, all those wonderful ideas, all that foundation, into useful outcomes. So there’s something not quite right”, she said.
Dr. Elsie Kaufmann further revealed that the reigning National Science and Maths Quiz Champions could not perform well in a science competition held in Portugal because they couldn’t recognize some of the equipment they were given although they had understanding of how it worked.
“…they [Science and Math Quiz champions] had been in a competition in Portugal and they won so they are the best and brightest science students, but they couldn’t do the competition, they couldn’t understand it because they couldn’t understand and recognize how the equipment they were given, worked. So they know all the theories, they can tell you, describe and explain everything but they cannot apply anything”, Dr. Kaufmann said.
She thus called for reformation in the educational curriculum to allow students fully develop their potentials and solve real-life problems
“We need to rethink the way we are teaching and educating our young people because they have so much potential but it’s not being translated into useful products, solutions of our real-life problems” she noted.
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