Embed critical thinking, employability, entrepreneurship skills in university programmes – experts

As the world accelerates towards greater complexity, individuals would require foresight in navigating a rapidly shifting landscape of organisational forms and skill requirements.

They would increasingly be called upon to reassess the skills they need, and quickly put together the right resources to develop and update these. Workers in the future would need to be adaptable lifelong learners.

Tope Toogun, CEO, Accelerated Learning Systems, said “educational institutions at primary, secondary, and post secondary are largely the products of technology infrastructure and social circumstances of the past. The landscape has changed and the educational institutions should consider how to adapt quickly in response. Employers are dissatisfied with the current level of new graduates’ inability to work on their own as well as with their critical and analytical ability.”

Toogun contended that educational institutions and universities in particular would need to “place additional emphasis on developing such skills as critical thinking skills, insight, and analysis capabilities; integrate new media literacy into education; include experiential learning that gives prominence to soft-skills such as ability to collaborate, work in groups, read social cues, and respond adaptively; and integrate interdisciplinary training that allow students to develop skills and knowledge in a range of subjects.”

Philips Consulting Education and Employability Survey report of 2014 revealed that “98 percent of employers rate verbal and written communication, ability to work in teams, critical and analytical reasoning as desirable qualities in graduate they are looking for. Sixty per cent of employers do not think tertiary institutions are doing a good job of producing successful graduate employees. 69 percent of employers believe that collaboration with tertiary institutions is important, especially through participation in internship programmes, 52 percent have never collaborated with institutions in curriculum design while 48 percent have never participated in graduate recruitment programmes with universities.”

Peter Okebula, chairman, Crawford University governing council and former executive secretary of Nigerian Universities Commission (NUC), said, “critical thinking skills are very important 21^st Century skills. They are a broad spectrum of skills needed to survive in the world today. They include ability to play well in a team, creativity, and innovation. To promote critical thinking skills we need a curriculum that would foster the development of such skills. A curriculum that is overloaded by teachers and aims to cover the syllabus leads to cramming or rote learning.”

He added, such “curriculum would reduce the content load, provide projects in every subject and on every topic that would give the students opportunity to experiment, observe, and manipulate variables.”

Okebukola further said, “this proposal would not work because the people who are curriculum developers, are set in their ways. They are not amenable to any of these novelties. When you propose that this should be the format for the curriculum, they would tell you, this topic is important it must be there, that topic is important it must be there. Then you have all these topics loaded into the curriculum. There is no opportunity for students to carry on with the development of critical thinking skills.”

Odumosu Omolara, CEO, Class Climax Consulting, suggested, “our children are not thinking out of the box anymore. They are not working for real life solutions to problems. Knowledge when it is not in its application form is not knowledge and this is the essence of critical thinking skills in schools.

“Students should be able to apply the knowledge they acquire. Analytical skills have to be taught right from foundation years. When students are taught to reason from childhood, they are primed to go the extra mile in problem solving skills necessary to for the actualisation of sustainable development.

“Children should be taught to learn on their own. Rote learning is not knowledge. All the subjects and topics in the curriculum should be reviewed in a way and manner that would help students to translate ideas into real life situations. Learning should be in-depth; the curriculum should have subjects tailored towards solving real life problems. There should be an extension activity to every subject and every topic.”