THERE is, at present, a palpable air of nonchalance about the perilous state of our educational system, from the primary, secondary to the tertiary levels. At the primary level, the slovenly teachers put on the air of nonchalant unconcern as they are mainly untrained, grossly under-remunerated, under-appreciated and consequently under-performing; the pupils, who are predominantly unserious by reason of unserious teachers and enchanted by the television, merely grope through the dingy tube of the primary school, and extruded from that tube after about six years, wondering what the six years inside that tube were all about.
Parents are not less to blame as father and mother, both in the working class, return very late from work and would not care a hoot what the educational progress of their child is.
The secondary level is the recipient of the sad product of the primary level and the tertiary level is the reservoir of the products of both the primary and secondary systems.
The initial chant of the moribund state of our higher institutions has, within a few years, morphed into a mantra of total neglect, national shame and a highly suspicious collective elite conspiracy against sound scholarship. The yearly social statistics of unemployed and unemployable graduates will embarrass any number of less shameful nations, but not Nigeria. Our educational infrastructure has been left to rot in a state of primitive anarchy, retardation and complete collapse.
Educationists, educational planners, educational psychologists, internal and external consultants, concerned professors, scholars, teachers and parents have all joined the debate of the tragic trajectory of Nigeria’s falling educational system. The slow, steady descent of our tertiary educational standard has come to present us with an unending, ugly, social dilemma of graduating millions of educated illiterates annually, accommodating unemployable graduates and men and women who can neither write proper English nor speak eloquently as proud products of our tertiary mills. Bad education, we have to say, muzzles every expression of our youth’s talent and turns them into empty heads with nothing to show for years of study at our higher institutions. It is that bad, we must say!
It is the auguries of what lay ahead that have made the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari to force a change in the story of woes that had trailed our falling educational standards. However, time would tell how far the president can force a total overhaul of our collapsed educational infrastructure. Meanwhile, the 2016 budget allocated N369.6billion for the Ministry of Education. The president then said, “We will invest in training of our youths through the revival of our technical and vocational institutions to ensure they are competent enough to seize the opportunities that will arise from this economic revival.”
Further the President explained that, “the administration is focused on providing a suitable environment for universities to grow, thrive and fulfil the triple mandate of research, which is knowledge generation, teaching which is knowledge transmission and responsive social engineering, which is knowledge application.” He also stated that, “It was with the aim of resuscitating research activities in the nation’s tertiary institutions that government put in place Tertiary Education Trust Fund to, namely, fund Institution Based Research and the National Research Fund. So much of these funds are yet to be accessed by the nation’s public universities and other institutions due to lack of fundable proposals.” The President’s nice sounding homilies on the resuscitation of our tertiary institutions were roundly condemned by the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU). They said that the allocation of N369.6billion to the education sector in the 2016 budget was a far cry from the 26 per cent standard prescribed by the UNESCO.
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They also noted that the educational sector still remains highly underfunded and that many countries with less incomes and population than Nigeria placed more premium on budgetary allocations to education and found it ironic that a government that promised to employ 500,000 teachers could devote so grossly meagre sum to the educational sector. Lecturers and professors in tertiary institutions now trade in handouts and engage in private practice.
The sad result of the fallen standard of education is that a sizeable crop of Nigerian parents, including the President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, prefer to send their children and wards to foreign institutions, like the UK, the US, South Africa and even Ghana. Back home, in Nigeria, the rulers pander to socio-financial excesses, abuse of privilege, corruption, misplaced priorities and the complete fudging of semantics when the issue of funding education comes up.
Government apathy and lack of adequate funding are not only the problems battling our fallen educational standards; we also have the human element. Students have been known to walk the fragile rim of peril by becoming cultists; lecturers are de-motivated and have become Jacks of all trades on our campuses, prostitution is rife, the distraction of mobile phones that has taken away academic inquiry, lack of mentors for our youths, hopelessness of life after studies, cost of living, collapse of social amenities and the glorification of materialism over academic excellence in our society.
The net effects of all these are the ongoing abortion of our youth’s inborn talents. We call on President Muhammadu Buhari to embrace an educational nationalism, a paradigm closely allied with Marshall Plan to revamp the parlous and perilous state of our educational standards and give it the priority it deserves.