Education should be more than just academic

Letters

THE Government has invested a lot in education with the main focus on ensuring that all school- aged children should have equal access to quality basic education which provides them with life-long skills in order to contribute to the development of this nation.
This is aligned to the country’s vision of integral human development.
And so our country’s education curriculum taught in all schools is also geared towards building a child in all aspects of human development and that is physically, socially and spiritually.
Even though the PNG’s education curriculum focuses on integral human development, all schools seem to shift their focus away from this whereby they are more concerned with one area only and that is, the academic excellence; while less effort is done to instil values into a child and to develop his or her personal character.
This is evident in schools whereby more time and effort is spent on teaching core subjects like English, Mathematics, Science and Social Science while less attention and effort is given to subjects like Personal Development which include CRE.
The general view of education is shifted to employment that we tend to forget the most important aspects of educating values to our children.
No wonder our society has experienced the rise in all sorts of social and law and order problems.
Pressure from other stakeholders like parents have also contributed to this because parents too are more concerned with their children doing well in these core subjects so that they may continue and get a good job at the end.
With pressure coming from parents and other stake holders like the MSU, school administrators too would like to make sure their school must do well in exams that they employ more time and resources in teaching these core subjects than the teaching of personal development.
But again not many children will academically be successful and continue on to get jobs.
I believe such practice in schools where by personal development is less considered important than core subjects has contributed greatly to the increased in social, and law order problems experienced in our society today.
Violence against women, school fights, abuses, corruption and many other problems have reformed our once peaceful society enriched with all the good values into a more violent and fearful society where ones rights and freedoms is being endangered.
The outcome of our education today cannot be measured only by just looking at the improvement and how skilful our working
population is but also one can measure the outcome by considering and looking at how our society has been affected by such problems.
We must be mindful that education influences lives of children and also can determine the type of society we want to have in future.
Effective teaching and learning of personal development can reduces these very problems affecting our society.
In other words education can change our society into a peaceful society if only learning and teaching in schools can equally focus on both the academic and personal character building.

Andrew Navak Kariva
Kokopo, ENB