Healing Education System In Nigeria -By Tosin Mike

Last year I stumbled on a quote on tragedy by Shakespare. The quote says “tragedy is misinterpreted comedy”. This means that all happenings that give us mental and psychology stress are meant to put smile of “oh I see my mistakes, I will make it work next time”.

Medically, both young and old adults are suffering from mental and psychological stress from tragedies that come their way as they perform their day to day activities.

Life tragedies are mostly unpleasant and they mostly cause mental and psychological stress.

It has been discovered that most human deaths and managed diseases are caused by stress- WHO

I am glad to inform every reader that as we try to manage our own stress, our children stress can also be reduced within the school system if high priority can be placed on our children dispositions to issues during their character formative years.

From 0-8 years, children’s characters are yet to be formed, their characters can easily be defined by the people they interact with but from 8-18 years, they start forming their own characters.

The subjects we teach children at their formative years, how we teach them and how they perceive the things they learn can either help them have a better attitude towards learning or mar them.

Teaching-learning process will be fun and easy for kids if they are been taught how to do the mental reasoning of what they are been taught and also replicating it on paper – Rhoda Odigboh.

It saddens me to know that I had once taught some curriculum lessons that they are rarely applicable to our children’s immediate environment.

Can you imagine what set of new generation we will create if “each topic or subject” taught in school during their character formative years has a way of teaching them the power of consistency, virtue of patience, integrity, perseverance, empathy, courage. For example in mathematics, we can have consistency in solving Mathematics problems, perseverance when failing Mathematics problems or in English, we can have empathy in use of English, focus of a storytelling, vision of story writing etc.

This practice will be best to help our children, especially those in upper primary and secondary schools to develop the right attitude to learning since it is going to have a way of communicating morals to them and then save them from most shades of incidences that might appear as tragedies at their early age.

It is a beautiful thing to know that Nigeria’s education system aim to develop all individuals’ cognitive, mental reasoning, social, emotional, moral and psychological intelligence so that they can be useful to themselves and to the nation.

Yes, Nigeria somewhat had it good in the time past. We started very well on the path to education liberation but it is so unfortunate that there is great decline in our education system and values such as selfless service to the community, self-reliance, genuine love for the nation, growth mindset etc. are no more core to the youths.

In 1983, the 6-3-3-4 education system was introduced to replace the 6-5-4 system for purpose advancement. The 6-3-3-4 education system’s curriculum aim to equip the youths with sellable skills that will help them to be self-reliant. In 2008, the 9-3-4 education system was introduced to replace the former and its curriculum are structured to meet Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2020.

At this point, I must commend the effort of the Ministry of Education for bringing the 9-3-4 system in place, knowing that our generation not only need to acquire skills to be sellable but also need to meet the MDGs which are,

• eradicate poverty and hunger
• achieve universal primary education
• promote gender equality and empower women
• reduce child mortality
• improve maternal health
• combat HIV/AIDS
• ensure environmental stability
• develop global partnership

We are still on the path to meeting these above mentioned goals while some other countries under UN already have plans on meeting the sustainable development goals (SDGs). This is because we still have some few things that are yet to addressed.

Research from Wikipedia reveals that Nigeria’ central government has been dominated by instability since the declaration of independence from the Britain and as a result of that, a unified set of education policies has not yet been successfully implemented.

Though our ministry of education had introduced 9-3-4 education system since 2008 to meet the MDGs but with that, Wikipedia still show that Nigeria has the largest population of out-of-school learning. Now I ask myself, what has been happening within the school system? Could it be that our pupils/students already learnt all they need in class and there is need to learn more out of school or they learn less in class and they need to compliment the little they have learnt with knowledge out of school?

Well I definitely know that Nigeria has best plans to educate her citizens but still trying to figure out how to implement all her plans.

I have read some paper works and I have also heard about some professors that spoke on why our education system is still not giving us our desired results, they all surmount to “poor implementation of our education system policies”.

I really will not doubt to know that many people in the education sector do not know what Nigerian education system policies are and how they are expected to implement them because most of them are there to earn a living and not to create a change in the system.

It is not completely bad to know that Nigeria has the highest out of school learning because the research made by UCLA- National Centre for Research on evaluation, Standards and Student Testing revealed that out of school learning has increases pupils/students interest in education and school itself.

Wallace foundation research also proved that out of school learning can be a great opportunity for pupils/students to discover their talents especially if a professional organization develops a learning environment that guides them.

Truly, if most successful youths’ success are direct or indirect result of out of school learning activities, fully incorporating the out of school learning activities into the school system’s curriculum would not be a bad idea. It will definitely make implementation easy if priorities are set right.

This endemic status of our education system needs a perfect quick intervention and we are going to give it our best shot till we meet the MDGs.