I Don’t See How Any Investment In Education Is Useless – Opoku-Agyeman Responds To Prof. Adei

Former Education Minister, Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyeman has reacted to comments from her colleague educationist, Prof. Steve Adei suggesting that the ‘200-Day schools’ initiative implemented by the erstwhile Mahama administration was a completely useless one.

Defending her administration on the ’21 Minutes with KKB’ show, she maintained that every investment in education, regardless of how minute or big it is, can never be considered useless especially because education is the backbone of every country’s development.

Prof. Adei made earlier suggestions to the effect that the decision by the Mahama government to put up some 200 community day senior high schools was a useless one considering that the only beneficiaries of the vision were the contractors who put up the said facilities and not Ghanaians. 

According to the educationist, situating most of these secondary schools in the hinterlands particularly was pointless since there were no hostel or boarding facilities available to students and teachers making it difficult for any of those schools in such obscure locations in rural Ghana to attract the needed numbers [1,500] to fully make use of the facilities.

“They are only useful for urban areas. All that they have put in the villages are going to be useless...they are useless. To transport 1,500 people within, you have to go about 30 km in order to fill them without any boarding, without any teachers' bungalows, nothing? How can you do so?”, he said earlier on the show.

But Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyeman flawed his suggestions, maintaining that the day schools were built to ease the burden of paying boarding fees and other costs on parents and to allow for more people to have access to secondary education without prohibitions.

“I don’t see how any investment in education can be useless, I think investment in education is good….. The focus was on Community Day schools for the reason that if you look at any child’s bills from the senior secondary schools, you’ll notice that the boarding was the highest and that was also the reason that somebody might or might not go to school”, she explained. 

“We argue that it would be nice for anyone to be in boarding school but that wasn’t the reason why they shouldn’t go to school at all. In so far as the person has been able to go to a day junior high school, the junior high school is still secondary. So you’ve done half as a day student, it ought to be possible for this person to complete it in the day system rather than not go to school at all and it is not just the fees, all the preparations that the parents must make provisions for and all of this was prohibited to a lot of our people so the plan was to try to remove the cost barriers to senior secondary education and that’s why we thought about day schools first”, she added