The Minister of State-designate in charge of Tertiary Education, Professor Kwesi Yankah, has defended the four-year Senior High School (SHS) curriculum, saying students who went through that system performed better than their counterparts who went through the three-year course. He, however, proposed a window to be opened for well-endowed schools that could complete the three-year system with the hope of posting good performance without restrictions. Prof. Yankah shared his views on the matter when he appeared before the Appointments Committee of Parliament last Monday. Answering questions on a wide range of issues, he described the complaints that private universities were much more expensive than public ones as a myth, contending that the gap between public and private universities was narrowing. Prof. Yankah, who is currently the Vice-Chancellor of the Central University, noted that many universities had evolved, leaving their core mandate behind. He submitted that tertiary institutions had moved away from their original courses and programmes and cited the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) as one such institution running many non-science programmes that did not encourage the younger universities to carve a niche for their own programmes. Culture of reading Touching on the need to improve the reading culture among schoolchildren, Prof. Yankah underscored the need for parents to read to their children to sleep, to imbibe in them a good reading culture. According to the university don, two per cent of primary schoolchildren could hardly read and write English and any other Ghanaian language and called for enough reading books to be supplied to schools, especially the deprived ones, to help change the situation. Asked whether he supported the compulsory retirement of 60 years in respect of teachers and lecturers who still had the drive to impart knowledge, Prof. Yankah indicated that there was a considerable number of youth out there who needed to be mentored to take up the mantle