Our foremost educationist, Babs Fafunwa, once narrated the story of a mild confrontation between a vice-chancellor of one of our universities and the principal of a famous secondary school. The vice-chancellor complained to the principal as to why he kept sending such weak students to his university. The principal retorted by asking why his interlocutor was always sending him such poor graduates as teachers.
Apocryphal or not, this encounter sums up the crisis of education in Nigeria;a problem that is as old as the chicken-and-egg dilemma. In the 1980s the World Bank coerced our government into prioritizing elementary as against tertiary education, as though the two were in some of some antinomian, binary conflict. The budgets for higher education were drastically cut down. The most qualified academics fled abroad in droves. The remnants went to work for Shell, NNPC and the banks. The dregs were left behind to teach. The types who saw nothing wrong in taking money for grades or forcing female undergraduates to compromise their bodies if they hoped to graduate. The boys took to cultism; terrorizing anyone who dared to fail them. These same “graduates” were churned out into the marketplace and the school system. It would be foolhardy to expect them to give what they do not have. The whole system has been in decay as a consequence.
My interest in education goes back to my national service days, when I taught at Akoko Anglican Grammar School at Arigidi-Ikare, Ondo State. I subsequently taught at Government Secondary School Giwa, outside the ancient city of Zaria, before joining Ahmadu Bello University as an assistant lecturer. In England, I taught Public Administration at Oxford while completing my doctorate. I subsequently joined Regents Business School where I rose to the rank of associate professor and head of Department of International Business.
At some point, I got discouraged with teaching and decided to move into international development. My students at Regents were wonderful, some of them the scions of the royal families of Europe and Arabia. One was an Agnelli, and another the son of a Swedish Count. There was a Jewish lad who told me he made his first million dollars at sixteen, and at eighteen was representing his father on the board of the diamond giant De Beers. There were several Old Etonians from the aristocratic families of England.
Sadly, I got the impression that most were not interested in learning for learning’s sake – the old Aristotelian-Platonic ideals of the enlightened human being. Most cared only about one thing – money – and how to make zillions of it. I have nothing against business schools, but I soon realized it was not the way I wanted to spend the best years of my life.
I shall not talk about the politics of the professoriate. Henry Kissinger, the most famous American Secretary of State in our century, a decampee from Harvard’s revered Department of Government, remarked that the politics of academia are so vicious because the stakes are so small. I found out that some academics are among the most petty, narrow-minded and tribalistic people you will ever find anywhere.
I have detoured into this personal biography not out of any vainglory – God forbid! — but only to buttress the fact that my interest in education is far from merely theoretical. I have never regretted my years of teaching. In fact, I consider it the best preparation for leadership and in government or the private sector. The British have this saying that “Nobody forgets a good teacher”. It has often been a my old students in different walks of life.
During his 2016 Budget presentation to the National Assembly a fortnight before Christmas, President Muhammadu Buhari announced some very important initiatives on education. The sector has been allocated the sum of N369 billion. The president also announced that 500,000 teachers would be employed. The president’s heart is, clearly, in the right place. The challenge is how all these plans will be translated into concrete deliverables, a task that lies squarely on the shoulders of the minister of education, Mallam Adamu. A man of the left and an outstanding Columbia-educated columnist and public intellectual, we believe he is up to the task.
The nineteenth century French education minister Jules Ferry used to boast that he could look at his watch any time of the day and could tell you exactly what was being taught to a French child at that time of the day. Ferry was a great educational reformer who contributed to making France’s education system among the best in the whole of civilized Europe. We in Nigeria could never boast of such an accomplishment.
Far from being the avenue for liberation as taught by the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, school, for millions of our children, is a prison and torture chamber where the koboko still reigns supreme. Rote learning is valued over creativity and free-thinking. The curriculum lacks rigour in the foundational subjects of English, Math and Science. And they don’t teach History anymore. As a consequence, we have a generation that knows not whither we came nor where we are going as a people.
We are told that more than a million qualified pupils cannot gain entry into our overcrowded universities and polytechnics. Parents who can afford it are sending off their children to far-flung outposts of which we know nothing. We now have more than 60 universities of varying quality and standards. Sadly, no Nigerian university features among the first 500 in the university league tables. None of ours comes anywhere close to such great South African institutions as Witwatersrand, Stellenbosch, Cape Town and Rhodes. Makerere, Legon, Nairobi and Cheikh Anta Diop – institutions in far poorer countries — rank higher than any Nigerian university.
What is worse, our university system is churning out graduates who are barely literate. We were gravely alarmed when a former director-general of the NYSC complained that some of the graduates being called up for national service could not fill the requisite forms without help.
So, when the government announced that 500,000 unemployed “graduates” will be recruited, we would expect that all applicants will be rigorously tested and only successful applicants should be allowed to undergo the necessary training. Teaching is a noble profession. In Finland, which consistently ranks first in terms of the quality of its educational system, entry into the teaching profession requires a minimum of a master’s degree. Selection is highly competitive. Although remuneration is average, teachers enjoy respect and prestige.
We need a complete educational revolution in this country. We need a school system that cares for the child as an individual, grooming them to become responsible citizens of a free and democratic country. We need a new approach to pedagogy – an education that liberates, that values science and innovation and that places a premium on creativity and skills. Happy New Year to you all!
OBADIAH MAILAFIA
Mailafia is an economist with a DPhil from Oxford. He has also served as deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria.
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