Government will over the next four years focus on Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education as it seeks to increase tertiary enrolment from the current 547,000 to 1.5million students as part of the strategies for the rapid socio-economic development of the country, the Minister of Education, Dr Yaw Adutwum has announced.
According to him focusing on STEM and increased enrolment at the tertiary level was the surest way of ensuring breaking away from the cycle of poverty that had bedeviled the country over the years.
“It is not just growing the figures in tertiary enrolment but also looking at who is part of the tertiary tool and that is where STEM comes in. If tertiary enrolment grows to 50per cent and the STEM component is not high enough, then we will still not get the benefit of tertiary enrolment and that is why government is doing it side by side,” he emphasised.
Dr Adutwum said this in Accra yesterday when Corderina Education and Technology Foundation presented 21 pieces of lego robotics kits as part of this year’s national robotics competition to be held in May.
The competition which would see 21 schools compete for honours would be organised in collaboration with the Ghana Education Service and the Ministry of Education and would have 16 schools competing in the senior high school category while five schools would compete at the basic school levels.
Dr Adutwum said increasing the enrolment ratio was important because there was no country that had developed without meeting a gross tertiary enrolment of about 40per cent, stressing that “South Korea has 93.6.”
“Ghana’s gross enrolment ration is 18.8per cent and when the president says that, I want to increase that to 40per cent, first of all we need to ask ourselves that, how many people are in tertiary at this time? It is 547,000 and for us to get to 40 per cent, without even looking at population growth, we have to increase the number of people in tertiary to about 1.5million before we can get to the 40 per cent.
As a Minister for Education, I care about K.G, I care about primary, I care about secondary but I also know that if we are going to transform the fortunes of this country, then we are going to have to improve STEM alongside the gross tertiary enrolment ratio because that is the low hanging fruit,” he explained.
The Minister said that was how to transform the country, short term medium term.
He noted that the OECD, the world economic forum as well as other organisations had warned that certain jobs were going to disappear with the fourth industrial revolution and countries that failed to do something about it would have a great challenge competing globally.
“When we talk about STEM, invariably people talk about science technology engineering and mathematics as the STEM subjects, but STEM is integrated and that is what makes STEM education important for the transformation of the country because when you are doing STEM you can’t do just memorisation.
As we do more stem we are increasing the critical thinking skills of our students and that is why stem is not memorising chemistry facts or biology facts.”
Dr Adutwum said STEM was not a study of science, technology, engineering and mathematics by itself rather the idea of learning everything together and increasing the critical thinking skills of our students.
He said government was building 20 STEM resource centres across the country and they would be equipped to provide rare opportunity for students to have STEM upbringing.
On his part the Board Chairman of Corderina Foundation, Mr Femi Ajayi said the continent had a huge technology gap that must be filled and this could only be done through STEM education.
He, therefore, called for the upping of the training of children in this area.
BY CLIFF EKUFUL
