Why are secondary school students suffering?

According to the Education Watch Report 2018-2019, which is prepared by Campaign for Popular Education (CAMPE), 55 percent of English and mathematics teachers in secondary schools have not been specifically trained to teach these two important subjects. The situation is worse with teachers who teach physics (75 percent), chemistry (78 percent) and general science (64 percent). Consequently, these teachers fail to give proper instruction to students and must compensate for their lack of knowledge by relying on "guidebooks" to teach students in the classroom. 

Astonishing as it may sound, these commercial guidebooks are basically replacing government-approved textbooks because the answers to questions are provided therein. Which basically means that an untrained teacher does not have to put in too much effort and students do not need to solve problems. We have reached a stage where students merely need to memorise the problems and solutions and then appear in school examinations. Things naturally go awry if those sets of questions do not appear in the school examination question papers! Regardless of how appalling it sounds, the fact that this situation has been allowed to deteriorate to this level is a failure of the authorities to provide teachers with training and take on the powerful syndicate of businessmen who control the "guidebook" trade.

Without quality education, the children will fail to do well in higher tiers of education. We cannot expect good graduates coming out of higher seats of learning if they are taught to memorise instead of how to analyse problems at school level. It is time for the concerned ministry to take a hard look at where its budgetary allocation is going. There is no point in churning out millions of students from secondary education because most of them will be handicapped by their lack of analytical skills. Today, we have millions of university graduates who are unemployed in the country because, among other things, they lack the skills demanded by the job industry. Now we know why.