Instill life skills in your children- national curriculum boss 

The government has urged parents to instil life skills and character into their children from infancy if the country is to once again have upright citizens.
Dr Grace Baguma, the director at the National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC), said parents have left the role of inculcating good character and life skills to the teachers, a trend she said is negatively impacting on the future leaders.
“Children pick what we do; that is what we call the hidden curriculum. So let’s go back and encourage parents to have time with their children to be available, to guide and train the unwritten curriculum, which is oral and forms the character we want to see in our young ones,” Dr Baguma said during the introductory engagement by the AliVe parental/ community initiative  in Kampala on Thursday, May 8.
She added: “The parents should be told that this is not for schools to manage because does it make sense to be a PhD holder but can’t clean your environment, you can’t organize your sitting room and people are sitting anywhere. Then what is education? Are we educating a whole person or are we having paper decorations. It’s in what you do that is when I can say that person is educated.
She went on to lash out at the educated Ugandans to the level of engineers and doctors yet they lack character.
“We need to blend and have a holistic approach to bring out the kind of person who will serve himself, community, and his home and serve everyone and that one was getting lost,” she said.

Adding: “Education doesn’t make sense when somebody has bad manners, that is what I sometimes
 call it. What is it for you to have all those engineering qualifications when you are not going to mix cement well leading to people’s houses falling and killing them.,

“So if you don’t have the value of honesty, then what kind of engineers are they. Even as we encourage our children to do various professions, they must have the basics of honesty. I was in a certain country and they said even if you left your phone there, no one can touch it, and I said what!. The ones who are snatching the phones are university graduates who say they are forging life.”

 Life skills are the fundamental abilities needed to manage everyday tasks and navigate challenges effectively.
Some of them are critical thinking, and problem-solving, creativity and innovation, communication, cooperation, and self-learning, mathematical computation, and ICT proficiency.

Speaking at the same event, Dr Mary Goretti Nakabugo, the executive director of Uwezo, said Uganda, just like other East African countries, is moving away from the traditional content-based approach curriculum to a … competency-based curriculum in which they emphasis life skills and values.

She said their research shows that children of now days don’t have life skills and that the Uganda National Examination Board, while releasing results, complains of the candidates not having life skills.
“One of the comments that the ED of Uneb makes in the report is that children were found lacking in competencies of problem-solving or critical thinking, they couldn’t go beyond remembering,” she said.

It’s upon this background that Dr Nakabugo said as Uwezo, they are going to carry out a campaign to create an invaluable opportunity to deepen the parents’ awareness of the importance of life skills and have them nurtured.

“Working collaboratively, through this campaign, we will share and learn about what works best in parental and community engagement in nurturing life skills,” she said.
The parental engagement is going to be in six districts of Kampala, Tororo, Sheema, Oyam, Kanungu, and Mukono.
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