EDUCATION, THE EPICENTER OF KNOWLEDGE (What is responsible for its downfall ?) PART 1

The present face of education today, gives a graphic picture of the defacing and dehumanizing condition of students and Nigerians who have continually been pauperized. The Nigerian students have remained more confused, rudderless, despondent, and weary of hoping to see the light at the end of the dark tunnel. It is my enormous believe that this country is endowed with sufficient human and natural resources to keep its educational system from resorting to foreign assistance for survival.

Sparing you a comprehensive academic definition of what education is. For a more practical purpose, education is an alphabetical construction of words where people’s mind, particularly the minds of the young ones are nurtured, molded, directed, informed, developed, enlightened, drilled, cultivated, edified, groomed, filled with new ideas, stuffed with knowledge, and disabused of wrong information to prepare them for a better future. The system of education in the 70’s and 80’s is totally and completely different from what we see today. A graduate of that time is employed immediately after graduation, however, same cannot be said today. The methods of lecturing, welfare of the students, provision of basic amenities, good infrastructures, well equipped libraries/classrooms and more, cannot be weighed on the same scale with the present system of education. Everything has changed, and the painful thing is that it did not change from bad to good but on the contrary. The standard has fallen, the value is no more, and the glory of our dear tertiary institutions have been lost. This particular position of our educational system that is not in consonance with other country’s system and obviously not encouraging, has given me a serious course to worry over. Our educational system has been neglected like an unproductive and infertile farm land, like many of our uncompleted and abandoned projects, like the constitution amendment bill that was never passed into law and lots more.

My question is, what and who is responsible for the fall of our educational system which is the epicenter of knowledge? How do we explain the sudden change from education to educonfusion? Education in the 21^st century, what is responsible for its downfall ? Why are the children of the poor and average people in the society quarantined from the children of the rich as regards to education? Why are the boisterous leaders of tomorrow been bogged down in the educational quagmire?

These questions and its like are what our leaders in various government parastatals and those involved need to provide answers to. It is a glaring fact to every good ambassador and patriotic citizen of this country that our educational system amongst all other administration suffered most in Obasanjo’s administration. If a leader can set up a body like the economic and financial crime commissions (EFCC), what then stops that leader from setting up a body that sees to the advancement of his country’s educational system you may ask. Make and implement policies that will fight against corruption, cultism, drug abuse, examination malpractice and so forth.

Our leaders cannot exculpate and refute the assertion that they are the cause of the cathartic attitude of students in terms of violence, quality of graduate(half-baked according to the leaders) and unpatriotic display. There are still much room for adjustment and amendment in our ways of leadership because I know that it has not fully reached the stage of fait accompli, as we can still stifle the negative artifacts in education and make our problems surmountable.

The people of Nigeria, the students, the market woman, the man next door, the cobbler on the street, the civil servant, the tailor, the medical doctor, the insignificant man who carries jerycans of water for sale, the vendor, just look out of the window, who can you see? They are also the cause of educational strangulation. Take a hypothetical example of a child whom his father knowing fully well that his child does not attend lectures, instead of bringing them to order, bribes the lecturer to award him marks on continuous assessments and exam that he never sat for, the next day he graduates with a good result and through the influence of his corrupt father, gets a job, cocks up the job and begin to siphon the country’s money into his pocket just like his father or more so, unfortunately for us and fortunately for him, he gets a job as a lecturer, what do we expect of someone with nothing in his brain to impart on the student if not things that will assist in destroying the fabrics of our educational system. Every Nigerian, whether patriotic or not, has a hand in the downfall of our educational system and so, there is a need to put hands together to rebuild and regain our stand, as the real giant of Africa.