Insurance marketer Edgar Wiredu has disagreed with President Nana Akufo-Addo’s position that laboratories and workshops of Technical High Schools are the answer to unemployment in the country.

In his view, the president is championing “ancient ideas” instead of thinking of technology which is ruling the world now. “It is high time we think of technology not laboratories and workshops for students in that level, the president has misfired.”

President Akufo-Addo said his government’s flagship policy, Free SHS, will not be turned into a process of churning out young people that will not be equipped with skills to cope with the modern world, stressing that that a high school educated child without any skills would be more frustrated than a child that ended her education at the Junior High School level.

It is against this that the President stated that, it is in the laboratories and workshops that students in the second cycle level will get the opportunity to expand their imagination, and develop the skills that would equip them for the job market.

But contributing on Onua FM morning show ‘YenNsem Pa’, Edgar Wiredu said the idea of workshops and laboratories belong to the past. Emphasis, he said, should rather be placed on making sure that students coming out of SHS are equipped with modern day trend of technologies, adding that “nations are using technology to build the future, we are here talking about workshops”.

Pointing to some examples to buttress his point, Edgar Wiredu explained that, elsewhere in the world, countries are using E-Learning to solve forest depletion, whiles some are also using technology to develop and bring change in the lives of their people.

He wondered why the president will not lead Ghana to champion same technological reforms rather than workshops. Edgar Wiredu posited that the President’s advisors are doing a great disservice to him and ask that they should be proactive in their thinking which will go a long way to help the country move forward, else Ghana will continue to lag behind in terms of technology.

“We are now in the era that is ruled by technology and we must also advance in that order. Our ‘big men’ travel, I think it is time we replicate what we see being done elsewhere or we can’t develop like them.”