Dr. Prince Hamid Armah, Vice Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Education, has argued strongly against the tangent whereby some individuals are quick to pick cost over the value that education brings to the citizens and national development.
According to him, education investment was not consumption, but social capital that produced skilled labour such as teachers, medical officers, lawyers and many others for the job market.
Dr. Armah, who also is a lawmaker for the people of Kwesimintim in the West Region, said this while on an Accra-based television station, Citi TV, on Friday discussing: “The Free SHS Policy; Time for a quick intervention review.”
He said there could not be any substitute for education investment, as opponents on the political divide had tried to put across. The Lawmaker submitted on the talk show that the then government’s myopic understanding of review, particularly, of the flagship Free Senior High School as captured in the 2010 to 2020 Education Strategic Plan, was problematic.
He observed that the former administration was more into cutting down the cost of education investment than finding pragmatic solutions. Quoting directly from the policy guide, he read: “Most of the students attending public senior secondary schools are actually coming from private [junior high] schools, so they are not poor, and they should be or receive boarding subsidies. However, it is important to subsidise needy but brilliant students, especially from the north, and hard to reach areas…”
It, therefore, baffles him how the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), which is a social democrat political party, would understand review of the Free SHS to be about the cost to the country and how to beat it down.
“I have never seen any centre-left party in the world that is so much obsessed with cost cutting with education service expenditure,” he states.
This, he warned, was that if education investment was looked from the consumption or expenditure perspectives, people would begin to get too worried and concerned about why so much money needed to be pumped into the sector.
Meanwhile, he reiterated that the value education cannot be overstated, especially that when more people get educated, they become less exposed to violence and other social vices.”The mere fact that somebody’s education level is moved from JHS to SHS affords to country the opportunity to improve the life of the person,” he added.
