The President of the Presbyterian University College-Ghana, Reverend Professor Emmanuel Adow Obeng, has urged policy makers to work closely with parents to integrate emotional intelligence into both school and home.
This, he said would enable children to have access to cohesive and comprehensive social emotional learning.
He was speaking at the second edition of the Emotional Intelligence Africa Summit at the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), under the theme “Building National Character of the New Ghanaian; the Role of Emotional Intelligence.”
The summit was organised by Addison International in partnership with the GIMPA chapter of the Graduate Students’ Association of Ghana (GRASAG) and the Students Representative Council (SRC).
Rev. Prof. Adow Obeng, encouraged parents to ensure their children received a high quality education that provided social emotional learning, as well as academic preparation.
“Parents need to petition educators and organisations to promote social emotional learning and support efforts to integrate school and home programmes to develop social and emotional skills holistically,” he said.
He also called on parents to make concerted efforts to help their children learn social and emotional skills at home, stressing that “they must also push for social emotional learning curricula standards”.
Rev. Prof. Obeng said to build a new character of a new Ghana, we must ensure that our classroom work focused not only on mastering academic material but also on how well students collaborated and communicated with one another.
Skills, he said, were imperative for today’s youngest generation, who require both social and emotional abilities to prepare them for the demands of a rapidly changing workplace and position them to achieve better academic outcomes.
He noted that the emerging labour market will require workers to be able to solve unstructured problems, work with new information and carry out non- routine manual tasks.
Founder and Host of the Summit, Mr James Addison urged Ghanaians to be emotionally conscious to enable them improve upon their relationships.
He said unmanaged emotions could hijack reasoning and logic which would contribute to responses the public may subsequently regret.
Mr Addison also underscored the need for Ghanaians to increase awareness about emotional intelligence, adding that persons who were emotionally intelligent could not be easily persuaded into engaging themselves in non-profitable ventures.
“It is very important for us to ensure we build a generation of people who would not be easily persuaded or used. You cannot be successful with human development if you leave out emotional intelligence,” he added.
He assured that Addison International would continue to offer its best in making sure that Ghanaians and Africans in general become capable of overcoming challenges the continent faced, using emotional intelligence.
BY RAISSA SAMBOU
