By Ibironke Oluwatobi
The idea of developing a nation without educating its people is surrealism. For any community to be transformed, the education of its residents is essential because it possesses transformative power. This grain of truth is consolidated by Nelson Mandela’s words, “education is the most powerful tool which can be used to change the world”. Nigerian writer, Ujunwa Atueyi, gave a hint on the potency of education, prescribing it as the antidote to the challenges in the entire constituent sectors of the country. With this knowledge; the thought of the slipshod state of our educational system becomes perplexing. The question of ‘why education is considered dispensable’ remains a myth. The closest thing to an answer is the hypothesis that the dilution of the educational quality in Nigeria is a ploy to limit the level of exposure of the natively educated.
Education, the repressed transformation tool, is continually drained of its potency by acts of botchery and self-interest. Evidence to this fact is that the field of the nation is grassed by a multitude of ‘government approved’ institutions of knowledge, yet the signs of education are missing. This conundrum raises questions such as; what we call education, is it really educating or just a paper religion? According to Malcolm X, our pose object is no guarantee of education. He opined that “because you have colleges and universities does not mean you have education”. Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a near definition of our schooling system. He said “we are students of words, we are shut up in schools and college-and recitation rooms for ten to fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words and do not know a thing.”
Sadly, the problems of our educational sector are numberless and associative. An array of adversity is responsible for consistently victimizing and robbing education in our institutions of its value. One of the major causes is poor facilities. Though the call for mass improvement in institutional facilities is well heard, yet it is cold shouldered. The outcry grows louder, while the redundancy of our curriculum grows to gather noise of its own. Our schools have become regular venue for strikes. Corruption, malpractices and scandals have all added to the cacophony in the system. The state of the system has denigrated to the point that a cloud of doubt readily hangs over the future of Nigerian graduates. To survive the wind outside school walls, graduates need to get educated elsewhere. For the mass of graduates that cannot afford educational tourism, the other available education is given by the streets. Some have considered this a more effective and useful learning process to schooling. However, this is not a case of options but a portent for Nigeria as a nation. The quiz for our educators is: how valid are our units of measuring educational quality? Some ministries grade the competence of teachers solely on the performance of their students in external examinations. Then, all the teacher has to do is to ensure the students pass the examination regardless of the method. This has led some teachers to provide answers for students during examinations and to indulge in other forms of malpractices to scale high on the ministries’ record.
Also, the design and methods of our educational outlay are moving in the opposite direction from perfect. Tutelage and mentorship are becoming strangers to our schools. Provision for personal assessment of students, which is the key to understanding and providing exclusively essential materials needed for student development, is becoming difficult to trace. For instance, the ratio of students to teachers in our schools is alarmingly high, high enough to threaten and extinguish the existence of student-teacher relationships. Though this scenario has become the norm in government institutions overtime, private schools have started to accept faults of this nature. It augurs well for more students to seek formal education but if educational facilities do not multiply at a proportional rate, the inundation of facilities becomes the status quo.
The defect in the educational system deepens with the high level of career misplacement suffered by our graduates. The foundation of this problem occurs at the point of course selection. In our institutions, the course selection pattern is usually nomadic. For a lot of Nigerian students, it is not uncommon to crowd certain “big” courses such as Law, Medicine and Engineering. This can be partly blamed on ignorance. But the major bummer is the fact that most courses in Nigerian institutions have skeletal schemes and structures. The path to practising these courses is warped; this has a way of waning off the passion and zest of the students taking the course and this tells off students naturally suited for these courses, leading them to deviate to the ‘loud’ courses. For instance, an average Nigerian student would not pick social work over Accounting even if better suited, except the course was given to him/her by the institution in place of the overcrowded courses which must have been the initial choice. This happens because our milieu has little tolerance for courses like Social Work as a profession. Nigerians believe by being part of the working population of the society, they are already social workers. This product of illusion shares the blame with the harsh economic conditions to put the unemployment rate at its current scary level. One way to correct this menace is to create an atmosphere of course equality in our institutions. This way, students get the true reflection of the prospect of each course. With this, a better pattern of career choice making can be registered. This would cure the problems of course crowding since course diversity would translate to more opportunity spacing in the society.
Conclusively, the bad face of our educational system should not be glossed over but thoroughly treated. Not treatment as regards the bombardment of students with theories and laws but the use of essential elements of education to concentrate the quality of our education. Then, education can truly manifest in our country. For what it is worth, true education is the latent energy of liberation. Therefore, the itinerary to our promised land lies in the atlas of thorough education. While some believe that the answers lie somewhere in the political arena and others have propounded theories of religious intervention, the genuine cure is patently at the formative level, at the very factory of education. A native adage says that a house thrives only because the trouble child has not grown. Even if the nation’s Moses appears on the political scene and successfully leads us to the promised land, the deficiencies in the education of our youths is bound to lead us back to Egypt. Nigeria should take this cue to understand that the atmosphere in the country is in dire need of a diffusion of educational panacea. It is the responsibility of all parties – students, parents and educators to pursue this redemption course, to bring about the much sought after utopian development to our dear nation, Nigeria.
Oluwatobi writes via [email protected]