Change country’s education system

THE life of a child in Papua New Guinea is on a paper.
The education system has destroyed our minds with imposed education.
Children spend over 12 years in school just to get a certificate without experience.
It seems a waste learning theories and unpractical subjects.
If you fail, you are considered useless.
A few commit suicide, some take drugs and others become prostitutes, criminals and vendors because they failed to obtain good results from the so-called certificate.
You go to school only to learn how to read and write and there’s nothing else.
By the time you leave school, you have no idea about money, entrepreneurship, coding, farming or software development.
You complete school without learning about life and the skills to help you live it.
Our school system was created for the purpose of labour.
It doesn’t encourage innovation.
It promotes the idea of looking for jobs instead of creating jobs.
We have foreigners dominating our industries.
Almost 90 per cent of the companies in the country are owned by foreigners.
Our graduates run to them for employment.
Our graduates get so comfortable with their salaries that they can’t think outside the box.
The problem with our education system is that, academic excellence is overrated. It only encourages the ability to understand a concept and memorise it to pass exams.
We have engineers who can’t mend a pothole and we have professors who can’t write a book.
The country is pregnant with graduates of useless qualifications only waiting for employment.
The system is producing thousands of graduates, but where is the development?
Where are the skills of entrepreneurship social mobility and human development?
Students spend time in school with the idea of working for wages and fighting over increments of salaries.
Go to China and Japan and you will find 16-year-old scientists and engineers.
You will find 20-year-old doctors and neurosurgeons.
These kids are taught how to think from a young age.
Their school system teaches them how to be creative, how to manufacture a car, how to operate a human body and how to make money.
This is why poverty rate is below 0.7 per cent in Asian countries.
In PNG, the schools teach you what to think, how to calculate money and how to be an employee.
The difference between us and Asia is that Asia produces employers and PNG produces employees.
After 12 to 30 years of school and many do not know how to think outside the box.
They don’t know how to be creative, innovative or generate money.
The education curriculum in PNG is useless.
That’s why the unemployment rate is so high.
The universities and colleges intakes are only limited to higher school certificate output.
Out of 31,000 grade 12 school leavers last year, only 9,300 have been selected for further studies.
Next February, we will see 20,000 kids fighting for spaces in our tertiary institutions.
Many would have to go back home because there’s not enough space.
Our education system made us think that without a paper, we can’t make it. The only way to change this is to reset our mindsets and get rid of this education system.
It is the main thing that keeps people under oppression.
It makes people think narrowly so that we keep on repeating the cycle of poverty no matter how hard we try.
Changing the entire education system is the key to start breaking the chains.

Rodney Noruma