The correlates of mental health and preschool education school system at Amhara regional state, Ethiopia: curriculum, teaching style and children’s engagement

The curriculum should provide a variety of activities to encourage behaviors appropriate to children's age, background, stage of development and individual need so that children will learn and enjoy going to school. Otherwise, children could develop psycho education problems which further changed into mental health problems like anxiety, depression and mood disorder. The objective of the present study was to investigate the relationship between mental health issues related to psycho education issues and preschool education system in Ethiopia. Furthermore, the appropriateness of preschool education system in terms of culture, context and method of teaching were investigated. To achieve type objectives, qualitative design was employed for a sample of 12 preschool education centers, text books and their syllabus were investigated. The findings of the study indicated that the preschool education system has no a guide line that indicated the learning tasks and activities to be accomplished with in the centers .furthermore, there was no uniformity among all preschool centers. The teaching –learning was found to be teacher dominated and the schedule was overloaded by subjects to be taught with in the classroom like secondary school system which seem to fail to consider the developmental characteristics of children with in preschool education system. The contents to be taught and the method of teaching was not found to be age appropriate as per theories of development and education like ecological, constructivism, multiple intelligence and socio-cultural. These could make children suffer from psycho- education related mental health problems like anxiety, boredom, depression, losing interest to go to schools. Recommendations and conclusions were made in relation to the major findings.