Deputy Minister of Education, Dr Yaw Osei Adutwum has maintained the need to analyse carefully the curricula studied by Senior High School (SHS) students across the country.

He made this revelation during a speech at the Academic City Stakeholder Round-table, which was held in Accra on June 1. 

It is on the theme “changing tertiary learning in Africa with premium teaching talent and activity-based learning; the ethos of ethics, innovation and entrepreneurship.”

According to him, in order to transform the social-economic sector to be at par with developing countries, a drastic reform is important hence SHS syllabi will be altered to boost the engineering capacity of the country.

“We cannot talk about transforming tertiary education and creating opportunity for more students to be educated in engineering if we do not reform our secondary education curriculum…” he said.

Dr Yaw Osei further noted that, despite the fact that a governmental policy exists safeguarding that about 50 percent of tertiary students should be science-oriented, the syllabi currently don’t “produce talents necessary for university development to transform this country…” he noted.

“How can you transform 15 percent of SHS students who are in science into 60 percent when they are in the university? It’s not possible unless we change how we educate students at the high school level…” he asserted.

Nonetheless, supporting the Ministry of Education’s engineering policy, Professor Fred McBagonluri; President of Academic City urged the government to train SHS to become critical thinkers in engineering likening it to the training students enrolled into Academic City pass through.

Mr McBagonluri said, “we need to teach them to become critical thinkers to know that engineering is essential. We can’t teach everything but the tools to go out to find problems and solve…”

Meanwhile, the Chairman Eureka African Group, Dev Vayarni chairman, addressing the stakeholders emphasized the need for the government to thrive “young smart children [because they are] the best resources”

“We have to trap every opportunity and as a continent, we have to make sure the best resource is young smart people. Government need to realise this is a small window opportunity and we can’t miss out…”