Story: Rueben SACKEY
The Chairman of National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA) Prof. Kwame Osei Kwarteng, has rejected claims that social studies as a subject has been removed from the Ghana’s curriculum.
The claim was reiterated by the Chairperson of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), Josephine Nkrumah where she called for a return to the subject in Ghanaian schools.
“Social Studies is the heartbeat of humanity. You cannot take that away. No matter what you do, you will live, work, co-exist, worship, fight, build on peace together as a people. So there is no reason why Social studies should be scrapped in any shape or form on this earth,” Ms Nkrumah said while speaking at the Social Studies National Conference at the University of Education, Winneba,
She added: “You see robots serving in restaurants, delivering food to the homes of people, collecting garbage and doing other things humans are supposed to do. All these should tell us a lot. We need to have an innovative way of maintaining the physical and social connections.”
However, the Chairman of NaCCA, Prof Kwame Osei Kwarteng said s social studies remains a subject at the JHS Level.
He explained that before the recent education reforms, there was social studies at all until the introduction of a new innovative subject called our world our people, which is more expansive than Social Studies.
Prof Kwarteng was the view that the NCCE Chairman was not well briefed before making the comment at the conference of association of social studies.
He said, “she was just throwing dust into the eyes of Ghanaians. I must also hasten to add that perhaps, she didn’t prepare well, she was not seized with the facts before going out to deliver that paper at the conference.
“There was nothing like social studies at KG and from P1 TO P6. There was not social studies, we thought that there was the need for social studies and we introduced a programme called ‘Our world, and Our People’. JHS1 to JHS 3, they have social studies, we have developed social studies curricula for that matter so I don’t get where the chair person was coming, we haven’t changed anything.”
