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FRIDAY DISCOURSE WITH DR. ALIYU TILDE Enrolment and Falling Standard of Education Presently,
state governments willing to revive education are faced with a dilemma.
What do they do with the gross imbalance between the high student
enrolment they inherited on the one hand and the lack of enough learning
resources on the other? Undoubtedly, this imbalance directly affects
quality of students. Such governments cannot simply gloss over this
problem because without addressing it, whatever is spent on the
structural improvement of the schools will surely amount to nothing. This
essay attempts to emphasize the need to decongest our schools and bring
back the regulatory mechanisms through which quality was once achieved
before the present decay set in. At the debut of western education in this country increase in enrolment of students was initially considered an encouraging development. The concern to make the sector attractive by governments continued well into the mid-seventies. Until then, managing standard of education was not a big problem because student enrolment and resources were balanced. Those
of us who had the opportunity to benefit from that dispensation would
recall how our class size was kept relatively small, not more than 36
pupils. We all had adequate bed space and a variety of uniforms to wear
in our boarding schools. Our meals were balanced and served on time. The
infrastructure was adequate; every boarding school enjoyed clean
drinking water from a borehole or from a general supply that was
regular. In addition, all secondary schools were boarding, a condition
that provided the maximum concentration that students required for
learning. In
those good old days, standard was largely maintained through a student
population policy that is best described by a pyramid. Only a fraction
of students, the best among them in fact, crossed from one level of the
educational ladder to the next. This ensured better results and good
management of the little resources available then. A secondary school
that boarded up to a thousand students, if ever found, was considered
too big a crowd to manage. Thus
from classrooms to dining halls, from hostels to sport fields, every
child had the opportunity to enjoy facilities as did his contemporaries
in other parts of the world. To sum it up, government did its best in
making adequate arrangement for students to succeed. And that is all
what it was required to do. It was left to us, the students, to work
hard. Those who used the opportunity wisely became successful; the rest
who squandered it have none to blame but themselves. The
English say comparisons are odious. That depicts any attempt to relate
the state of education yesterday as described above and its condition
today. I was shocked three years ago to learn of a day school in the
northeast with a population of over 7,000 students! I also discovered
that in many metropolitan schools around, classes made for a maximum of
40 have today between 150 and 250 students. What
does any government hope to achieve with this? We do not need to talk
about facilities, because under the present financial limitations, no
government can claim to be providing even a quarter of the need of such
students. Visit the schools and you will find that the students are
living under sub-human conditions. There is little wonder therefore that
standard of education has fallen so drastically. Two incidents will make
the picture clearer. Someone recently tried to assist a daughter of his
friend with her homework. He soon realized that the girl that is in JSS
III couldn’t even read English alphabets. A student of SSS I was asked
the answer to 6 + 0. He said 9! A
number of reasons are responsible for the declining standard of
education. They include under-funding, increase in enrolment,
indiscipline among students, lack of trained teachers and facilities,
etc. However, most of these are effects rather than causes. The cause,
which is often ignored, is student enrolment. And unless increase in
enrolment is done commensurate with available skills and affordable
resources, a stress will be exerted on the system beyond what its
strength can withstand. Decline in standard of the product thereby
becomes inevitable. State governments eager to improve education must
pay utmost attention to this problem. There
are a number of reasons why our schools are congested. First is the
philosophy upon which education was founded especially in the last
twenty-eight years. This philosophy was borrowed from the doctrine of
social democracy of Europe and America that aims at an egalitarian
distribution of both rights and resources among citizens. Political
rights, it argues, have no meaning if citizens are not given equal
opportunity in sharing resources. This is a noble objective, and it was
natural that education became one of the sectors most affected by it
because the economy of nations and individuals today are knowledge
based. This
philosophy was borrowed by many developing countries especially those
that were influenced by socialist doctrines. Egypt for example did so in
the late forties and early fifties under the socialist regime of Naser.
It made learning compulsory on every citizen. What was
“aristocratic” was made “democratic”, to borrow from the
parlance of the late Dr. Taha Husein, the father of modern Arabic
literature. In his thesis, Dr. Husein observed that learning, before its
democratization, was undertaken only by a small fraction of the
population that inherited it or had cause to delve into it. With
democratization, its gates were opened to all and sundry, something that
need considerable skill and resources to manage. Nigeria
started to borrow this philosophy with the introduction of free and
universal primary education program in the defunct Western Region. But
critically speaking, school enrolment was expected to rise nationwide
due to both increases in population and enlightenment. By 1975, our
population must have increased by at least 25% over its 1963 figure,
when we last had an officially published census. By that time too,
students who went to primary schools in the early 1950s have tasted the
benefits of education and have also become parents of children who were
ripe by the early 1970s to enroll in schools. So there were demographic
and other social pressures on primary and secondary schools that called
for increase their enrolment by 1975. The
issue of planning became central as the two pressures persisted to the
present day. It was perhaps against the background of this pressure that
Universal Primary Education (UPE) was introduced during the
Murtala-Obasanjo regime. Nothing really was bad about UPE, were adequate
arrangements made for its personnel and sustainability beyond the
lifetime of the regime. Unfortunately, both conditions were not met. And
against experts’ advice the regime went ahead to introduce it. As it
turned out, neither the Obasanjo regime could supply the enormous number
of teachers required nor could the Shagari regime which succeeded it,
with the fall in oil prices after 1981, continue to fund the schools to
the pre-1975 standard. Secondly,
beyond the primary school, standard could have been maintained
reasonably if governments had continued with some of their previous
policies on absorption into secondary schools. As a result of politics
and the desire of each state to get its fair share of the national cake
in which student enrolment is a determining factor, more secondary
schools were opened during the Second Republic. Admissions went berserk.
Almost nationwide, checks and balances in the system were abandoned. Then
came what they call ‘automatic absorption’ of primary school pupils
into secondary schools. Before 1975, half of the students were weeded at
the national common entrance examination and ‘interview’ that
followed. Thus, in a class of 36 in our primary school, only 18
‘passed’ to various post primary schools in defunct Northeastern
State. Today, the common entrance examination is a sham, and there is no
‘interview’ to corroborate the marks obtained at the common
entrance. Also, promotions in all schools – from one class to another
– are practically automatic, devoid of merit. Students are made to
understand that whether they work hard or not they will be absorbed into
junior secondary schools. This
entailed two things: One, desecration of merit, or discouraging it
entirely; and two, it over-stretched the resources of government.
Training a child in the secondary school, where some degree of
specialization (and therefore more equipment, manpower and
infrastructure) is required is about seven times that of a primary
school child. The
third factor is the sad habit of many education officials. Apart from
adopting automatic absorption, or 75% absorption as the policy
prescribes, admissions were decentralized from their position in the
ministries of education to schools. As a result of this, no state
ministry of education can today precisely account for the number of its
students. Ministry officials, principals, vice-principals, game masters,
etc, give admissions for token amounts into all levels throughout the
year. It is a very disheartening situation. The implication of this is
that at every moment, someone somewhere is carelessly committing
government without its knowledge. In
the end, we have schools that had the reputation for excellence
transformed into dead woods inhabited by thousands of termites called
students who cannot produce a single credit at GCE for years. This must
not be allowed to continue. It must be reversed at all cost. We must
ensure that sanity returns to our schools. I have always argued that
nothing new needs to be introduced. The old concept of pyramid is still
valid and it will remain so as far as enrolment in education is
concerned. Finally, the bitter pill of decongesting our schools has to
be swallowed. |