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Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense: Nigeria, What Manner Of Education By Prince Charles Dickson Jos, Plateau Nigeria
I have lost count of the number of times that I have written on the educational mess we are in, but I have not lost hope, so I will not stop. Sadly, it has become a case of when we are not decrying poor student quality, it would be low scholarly ability of the teachers, and we are graduating young and old in their thousands, yet a high percentage largely unprepared in cases and in other situations ill-prepared for life away from the ivory tower. We have not been able to tackle the menace of cultism, that is when the Minister is not bribing for Budget or another Minister is not removed acrimoniously. We have spent time arguing whether government should hands off accommodation or not. The list of misadventure is endless, the hope is... While no University has attained any real level of autonomy, there is no resource to control. Strikes by the labour units from Primary to tertiary level have been a situation of jungle negotiation with the government at one point or the other reneging on its promises. Weeks back in the papers Sheila Solarin widow of the late educationalist Tai Solarin cried out that pupils entering J.S 1 could neither read nor write English, in her short take she noted the absence of teachers to teach and very few people I am sure noticed the little piece which was tightly squeezed at the letters to editor corner of the Guardian Newspapers. The bitter truth is that we are reeling out nonsense from our Primary stage to the highest level of education. We are cursed with a leadership that is at loss to what the cure is. We have developed a set of students whose parents bribe up the academic ladder because teacher will teach nonsense after all. Our schools today at best are filled with frustrated persons that are still holding the chalk for lack of what next to do. Every year no one is really taking stock of the number of University manpower leaving the shores of this nation never to return and we just sit and term it brain drain, when in truth it has become a complete DRAIN, brain and belly, soul and spirit. We are a nation of largely intelligent illiterates so we do not bother about statistics, in most Universities a student goes through a University education without the benefit of experiencing a Professor teach him, or interact with him, the days when students sought admission into schools based on the reputation of some Professors are gone. Instead we have scholars who have built reputation for Rank Xeroxing Philip Kotler's marketing text word for word as handout on a ‘buy and pass basis’, that is when the teacher is not a Mr. Lecturer insisting that Bimbo must go the whole length of her skirt to pass. Sometime ago the raging issue was a dress code for students of schools of higher learning, then I asked should we not be ashamed that we have stooped this low, what happened to days when the fear of a teacher was wisdom. The fear of a teacher was enough for a student to know he/she needs to dress decently. Now to hell with the Vice Chancellor, after all he who goes to equity must go with clean hands..
We
cannot guarantee any form of free
education, most Governors have
turned state bursary allocations
into political tools, that is when
it is not intelligently and
crookedly sent to
Teachers...crave my
indulgence some months
back in
At the just concluded National Council on Education meeting the Minister For Education, Mrs Oby, can out smoking but then give her and this government some time the smoke will die down to a point you hardly will notice the ashes, all she hard to say was on the indiscrimatory award of honourary doctorate degrees, to this I say good morning to her, the problem besetting the educational sector has gone beyond the award of degrees. I know a Governor that since 1999 at the last count had got 13 all from Nigerian Universities, so my Sister Oby, leave that one, before Oby, was the post -JAMB woman, how did she end, already I hear there is a power tussle between the current Minster and the Senate committee chairwoman Joy Emordi, while our education is on fire, those concerned with salvaging what is left engage in personality clashes.
In my
daily
routine
with
Newspapers
I am
beseeched
with
adverts
for
schools
offering
better
education,
from
Why do we like to lie to ourselves...I never will know, I can authoritatively tell you that in the whole of Plateau State, Abia, Kano and Osun States by random sampling no public school has a functional up to date complete computer unit with Printer and Governors will tell you how they have transversed from Galilee to Riyadh in improving education and the government at the center is preaching info-tech. The school feeding programme has stopped were it started because it was more political than not. Again we are pursuing a dumb, deaf and blind policy of free education tagged UBE, what happened to UPE, nothing other than failure of policy and it is already happening to the UBE reform. The Government does not have the manpower to cater for the children that are going to start the programme, some states are not even prepared, so we are going to employ crash teachers to teach crash pupils that will crash retrogressively till they crash land with empty heads. I intend to establish a primary school right in my car garage because I love kids, no, because its good business, just imagine I have 200 children and they pay only, I mean only 10 thousand Naira and I have five teachers who have any qualification, the only basic requirement is we are of the same faith or tribe, what else does one need to tell you that business is good. What the kids are taught is secondary and off course they go on a lot of excursions which the parents pay for. This in summary is the typical run of the mill private nursery and primary school and we looked at these kids and called them future leaders of tomorrow, I can say that tomorrow, certainly is bleak. I have blamed government, teachers, but sadly the worst culprit in falling standards of education remains our parents whose values have also taken a deep, the days when parents insisted that their wards passed with good grades to move to the next class has been substituted to an era that this same parents now buy question papers ahead of the exams, bribe examiners, make sure the kids study courses they lack interest and lack the required basics, and then we turn around to blame government is double hypocrisy and crying wolf where there are no rats.
Parents do not even know what their wards are doing in school; “let me see your homework” is now a strange phrase in families. Who really cares, the Ibos to Alaba in droves, and our Yoruba brothers to the mechanic workshop and how about us in the North, its worse because our leaders are fighting for a center. These are no apprentice by calling but because of lack of choice. An uneducated populace is one of the recipes for catrostrophic socio-eco-political, cultural and steady future, a nation where anything will always go. We need to go back to the All-Wise One, or else, this terrible reality will go a stage beyond repair.
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