Keep children in check

AS the 2019 school year draws to a close this week, parents and guardians are being reminded of their responsibilities to keep their children in check and out of mischief during the Christmas-New Year holidays.
The festive season is a time of great joy but it is prone to accidents that can easily turn celebrations into disasters.
Guest speakers at school graduation ceremonies this week have been giving sound advice to children, parents and guardians.
And we ask if our education system is grooming innovators and wealth creators.
That is the related question to ask now as it is that time of the year again when the future of thousands of school going people is on the mind of everyone who has an interest in their progress.
Graduations are happening all over the country.
About 66,450 Grade 10, 29,000 Grade 12 and 120,000 Grade 8 students will have passed through the different stages of the formal education system at the end of the 2019 academic year.
For these 215,450 students, their future literally hinged on these exams; passing them with above average grades would mean proceeding to higher grades for some or placements at tertiary institutions for others.
Parents and students will be looking forward to proceeding to the next stage of their life’s education journey.
Sadly though, given the workings of the formal education system, the bulk of these young people will be left out to fend for themselves.
They will have been pushed out of the comfort and security of a classroom and a caring teacher.
Why should it be the same old story again of parents bemoaning their children’s lack of luck and sense of failure and being not good enough?
Only a few thousand will proceed to the next level of education as dictated by the education system’s type of natural selection where the most academically fit survive and proceed to another stage of schooling.
The motivational speeches at graduation ceremonies will largely be forgotten by the listeners who will now be pre-occupied with what the future holds for them.
It is time now to give some hope even to those who fail to proceed to the next grade or university level education.
Hope should not be merely in motivational speeches and romanticising hard work or working the land.
It should be more than that.
It should be something in them that will drive them to get out there and grab their life’s circumstances and turn them to their advantage.
There should be an entrepreneurial spirit and a yearning in their young minds to improve their lot.
Many of these young people who have grown up in towns and settlements away from their traditional villages have no land to return to make a living if the education pushes them out.
They will need something apart from land.
They will need to generate a living using their minds and hands.
This is where life skills such those taught by people as Papa Tam through the personal viability training come into play.
There is nothing more rewarding than being financially independent and that is precisely what sets a big businessman apart from an employee who should work to pay for his basic needs and worse, to pay debts obtained to meet some of those needs.
The government’s drive in promoting small and medium enterprises will be quite successfully if those existing and prospective entrepreneurs have had personal viability training.