Stop wasting money on GES; scrap it – Kofi Bentil

Vice President of policy think thank, IMANI Ghana, and Lecturer at Ashesi University, Kofi Bentil, says the Ghana Education Service(GES) appears useless in the educational system, hence must be scrapped.

“I have held this view for a number of years after quiet a bit of study, and there have been series of situations which have come to support my position and the very latest is the Prof. Quarm’s contradictions. I’m very sure this country will save a lot of money, and do better with the kind of money we’re spending on GES, if we scrap it and look for an important paradigm for educating our children,” Kofi Bentil said in an interview with Accra-based Citi FM.

According to him, the GES is clearly miseducating school children claiming that the continuous existence of the unit under the Ministry of Education will affect greatly the academic laurels of students.

Kofi Bentil’s argument comes on the back of the contradiction by the Ghana Education Service(GES), depicting that the much criticised text book which classifies the head as a body part used for carrying loads was approved in the year 2011. This position is at variance with the claims of the Education Ministry that the book had not been taken through the approval processes of the Curriculum Research and Development Division of the Ghana Education Service.

However, there appears to be no end in sight to the confusion streaming in between the two outfits as the Director of the National Council for Curriculum Assessment, Charles Aheto Tsegah, has dismissed suggestions that the function of the head as stated in the textbook was erroneous.

“It is true, the head is used for carrying load, and that is a fact.” “It is not only in Ghanaian culture, in the case of East Africa, they don’t carry load on their head, they hung the strip of that load carrier around their head and carry it on their back, so the head is used for carrying load, you can challenge that, and it is actually part of our cultural way of life so I don’t know where the error is,” Aheto maintained.