Time to rethink teaching

Skits showing Nigerian (and Beninese/Togolese) university graduates sidesplittingly exposing their ignorance and even illiteracy are not funny. This is because they are founded on a sobering fact. Something is seriously skewed about a system of education that is consistently churning out poorer products every passing year for the past four decades.

At its best the primary, secondary and tertiary scheme of schooling inherited at independence produced plausible professionals that distinguished themselves in all fields, home and abroad. Sir Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa, Nigeria’s first and only Prime Minister, was nicknamed ‘the Golden Voice of Africa’ on account of his outstanding oratory and he never even ventured into any university. It is possible such icons excelled because they also benefitted from indigenous Islamic and Christian religious systems of education.

Apparently, the decay set in the 1980s with the implementation of IMF-inspired Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) by then President Ibrahim Babangida. The regime required withdrawal of the full subsidy to the system alongside deregulation, devaluation of the Naira and liberalisation of the economy. It was the equivalent of President Bola Tinubu’s recent removal of fuel and foreign exchange subsidy in one single but deathly blow.

The strategic sabotage by the so-called International Development Institutions has continued to be the bane of the system. Just last year, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) accused both the IMF and the World Bank of working relentlessly to undermine Nigeria’s public education system. Speaking at an event marking the 2024 ASUU’s Heroes Day on November 24, the association’s president, Professor Emmanuel Osodeke said, “Comrades, like in the past, this year’s celebration of our heroes also takes place as we continue the struggle to rescue Nigeria’s public universities from the suffocating clutches of the World Bank and the IMF whose determination to destroy and bury our public university system has not abated.”

Predictably, the sector has since the 1990s stopped attracting the ablest and became a refuge for many human resources rejects. It has reached a point that public office holders and politicians put the names of all unemployable partisans on the roll-call of teachers. Devalued earnings also meant that even the capable and dedicated teachers now had to run a side-business just to survive. Underfunding also meant that basic facilities faded out and most public schools at all levels started spiralling into ramshackle shelters fit only for ritualists, robbers, rodents and lately bandits.

Of course, the elite have long since moved their children and wards into better-funded private institutions, some of which charge in foreign currencies. The super-privileged spent a staggering $1.2 billion annually on foreign education. Our loss is their gain. Another snag is that those in public service mostly need to steal from public coffers to meet up with the bills while the masses must do with what is available and that can only release the results reeled out in all those tragicomic videos.

The situation is so sombre that it really requires a start from the scratch. An education philosophy put together by retreating colonial overlords cannot serve the sovereign interest of any purportedly independent nation. Freedom 101 teaches that self-determination starts with indigenous intellection. Some sixty years into statehood, the National Policy on Education (revised 2013) highlights that its objective is “to document the efforts that government at the federal and state levels intend to invest or are investing to ensuring Nigeria is a LITERATE country.” (Emphasis added).

Only a nation that inherited and retained an educational system calculated to produce clerks and secretaries for serving colonial exploitation worries about literacy in the 21^st Century AD. The majority of former colonised territories have moved on. For instance, the Asian Tigers quantum-leaped into developed states when they decided literally to roar in their own tongues. They simply translated the sciences and humanities into indigenous languages and focussed all teaching and training towards national development. Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in addition to religious instruction are sine qua non for sovereign survival.

Curricula are the crux of education. Schools should send out more employers than employees because one sign of underdevelopment is when there are more applicants than jobs. With the Fourth Industrial Revolution underway, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IOT) has completely changed the character of employment even more. Information Communication Technology (ICT) is the new currency for development.

Present paradigms and models are designed to perpetuate our under-development while promoting the prosperity of former colonial and new neo-colonial powers. Experts in the sciences and humanities need to rethink the entire curricula and philosophy of education with a view to thoroughly decolonise it and embed our etymology and epistemology for national and continental development.

For lack of an independent spirit and entrepreneurial training, graduates spend years if not decades waiting for jobs instead of creating them. Even worse: the labour market is full of the utterly unemployable. There is something seriously wrong with a schooling scheme that teaches students to continuously fail in claiming their inherent capacity for self-reliance.

Resetting the education system is expensive only when we do not compare it with the cost of ignorance. Critical challenges in providing functional formal education at all levels to over 100 million citizens of school-age must be confronted head-on. There are currently around 80 million children in crèches, nursery and kindergarten classes; 31 million in primary schools; 12 million in junior and senior secondary schools and five million in the universities. According to UNESCO, there are also 20 million out-of-school children, the highest of any country.

The crises in the sector are so intricate that beyond enhancing budgetary allocation to the globally accepted minimum of 26 per cent, government needs to galvanise all stakeholders to fully review and restore this vital institution. Quality and quantity both cry out for urgent intervention. Ranging from academics, administrators, clerics, educationists, entrepreneurs to parents/guardians, traditional rulers and civil society organisations, the list of participants in the project of restoring education is almost endless.

Individuals and societies can only rise as high as their level and standard of scholarship. Knowledge is the first Commandment and foundation for sustainable progress. Indigenous knowledge systems served us well for centuries and can still offer innovations and solutions suited to our unique cultural context. In this way, policies and programmes for equitable and sustainable improvement in the living conditions of common citizens can be realised. A nation whose teachers are beggars can only produce brutal criminals, cultists, sheepish followers, street-beggars, scammers and ‘vagabonds in power.’