A warning by a group of some female Senior High School (SHS) students to wives to hide their husbands to avoid losing them (husbands) to them (students) has sparked reactions.The students gave the caution in a video making the rounds on social media, saying any wife that lets loose her husband during this upcoming holiday period risks losing him."Wives, please hide your husbands because we, the high school girls, are about to return home for our holidays," the students are heard saying in the video.
Meanwhile, a former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana, Professor Ivan Addae Mensah, has claimed that the NPP government’s flagship Free Senior High School policy is only producing quantity and not quality students, hence the need to take a second look at it.
According to him, the policy, as it is currently being implemented, amounts to sacrificing quality for quantity.
The learned academic explained that the fact that the majority of the products of the free SHS policy are unable to qualify for admission into the country’s two premier universities is a testament to its poor quality.
"Out of the over 720 senior high schools in the country, only 110 of them have had their students make it to the two traditional medical schools at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) and the University of Ghana," Myjoyonline.com quoted Prof. Addae Mensah as having said.
He advised the government to focus on replicating what makes the few schools perform better instead of establishing STEM schools.
He joins other analysts like his colleague, Professor Stephen Adei, an economist and the Chairman of the National Development Planning Commission, who raised concern about the economic cost of the programme and called for its review.
He explained that allocating GH₵7.5billion to the Free SHS programme alone every year is an overstretch of the economy.
He advocated for the exemption of some so-called best Senior High Schools in the country from the policy, so that the wealthy people who take their children to such schools must pay for their education.
"We have to look at it again. I think that there are certain schools that we should make autonomous and fee-paying so that people will go there, but then make sure there are good community schools for everybody else. So the Achimota’s and the Wey Gey Hey’s, where people want their children to go, let them pay.
"Only a small proportion of the poor come to Achimota. Let the rich go there and pay. Use the Achimota funds to have very good schools in every district so that they can be there and not have to travel. They just come from the villages," Professor Stephen Adei said.
But the government has insisted on continuing the implementation of the free SHS policy despite the plethora of concerns and recommendations by many analysts and stakeholders.
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