I wish to join the globe to celebrate the International day of education.
Despite the subjective interpretation of the word “Education” by many to be limited to “western education”; I will go with the definition of education as “deliberate conscious effort being made to create an atmosphere of learning and the learning process so that learners can actively develop their potential to have a religious-spiritual strength, self-control, personality & intelligence”.
Culture over time have had a lot of impact on education there by setting the pace and direction for development.
The adoption of different models of education without modification to suit our peculiarities as a people viz a viz our culture, beliefs and craftsmanship; can largely account for our lag on the lane of development.
A critical review can be the educational pattern of the Asian nations that was craft based had evolved into technical education; with the technical sector evolving into the global celebrated technological sector globally.
Our Ibo brothers from the south east and the Fulanis from the North regardless of western education have sustained their originality ( trade and pastoral farming) which against all odds have kept a reasonable number of their populace self employed.
In the west and midwest, a pocket full of cash crop ( cocoa, rubber etc) still exist though the western educational pattern have dominated the region.
This adoption has rather deemphasized the true context of efficiency and sacrificed efficiency on the altar of certification; a major reverse gear as we strive towards development.
The break of ICT had rather revealed that certification is not as important as raw talent; as many talented and creative individuals had broken through.
This is a clear pointer to the fact that the remodeling of our education system from 6-3-3-4 to 9-3-4 is still lacking as the developmental ingredient is missing.
The poor infrastructures in our schools and starved man power (especially primary and secondary school teachers), have worsen the state of our education and extinguished quality out of our educational system.
This have left us with half baked or unbaked graduates that have little or no out put.
Amidst these realities, it is better late than never as we can restructure our educational system to respond to the day to day needs of our system and project the future of our dear nation on the indices of a remodeled formula that is self sustaining.
It is important to return education back to the exclusive list of government and rather delist subjects like mining so as to challenge governments at all levels to create jobs while Manning the responsibility of producing super qualified products out of our educational system.
This will in turn strengthen public schools and grant the children of the common man access to education, while providing curricular homogeneity in all our schools.
While celebrating public school teachers across the nation, I wish us all a happy International day of Education as we bare in mind that “Education is a right and not a privilege”.
#WorldEducationDay
Obande Gideon
President, Ochetoha K’Idoma Youth Wing