Quality education

IN a layman’s term, quality education is education that is relevant and adapted to the needs of society, that can meet the standards in health, growth, and physical survival in a complex and globalised world.
It implies education that is worthwhile and which empowers the recipients with relevant skills, knowledge, ideas, values and attitudes needed for them to make informed decisions and live a self-sustaining life.
Quality education produces a complete person – complete in the sense that the person is intellectually, morally, physically, emotionally and socially developed.
Education without quality can even be more dangerous than no education at all; without quality the country will continue to produce unqualified graduates who are of no value in society.
Quality education entails that the products of high schools and institutions of higher education should be able to perform according to expected standards and be able to compete. However, there are several factors that pose greater challenges to quality education.
Inadequate funding is the most critical challenge that has threatened the attainment of good quality education.
Despites all efforts made by the government to improve all learning institutions, the government has not showed enough commitment towards adequate funding to expand our country’s higher learning institutions to accommodate the thousands of students leaving year 12 every year.
Inadequate teaching staff or the poor quality of teaching staff is a big challenge to the attainment of quality in all levels of our education system.
More emphasis is on the academic staff because teachers are needed for good education which leads to social change, social transformation and national development.
Many higher learning institutions in the country are short of qualified academic staff to adequately handle teaching and learning activities.
Quality education depends on the quality and quantity of human and material resources.
The lack of infrastructures such as science laboratories, computer labs, classrooms, student dormitories, libraries and electricity among others affect the quality of education.
For good quality delivery, these facilities must meet the minimum standard specified by the National
Department of Education or the Science Research and Higher Education Board.
We need a lot of lecture halls or classrooms to ensure quality teaching and learning is in place with small class sizes to promote effective student-teacher interaction.
Unfortunately, many classrooms and lecture halls in most
learning institutions in PNG are overcrowded and we often see students standing at the corridors during lectures or peeping through the windows to absorb what they can collect.

Ken Nandawa
Rou’areke Wekei