How did the mighty fall? Focus on the Nigeria primary and secondary education system
Back in the days Nigeria could brag and compete favourably well with any country in the world in terms of the quality of education in the country even with a low number of schools, whatever happened to those days is what we our yet to fight as a nation.
Those who had the opportunity to be part of that privilege generation can beat their chest that they did not just enjoy the best of the educational sector but the best of their country too as they were tutored by not just the best hands but with adequate facilities(most of the teachers then were foreigners/missionaries)filled with passion as they willingly gave their all not minding what they stand to gain or loose, no wonder they had that believe that "a teachers reward is in heaven", be it as it may the Onus of this write up is not in what happened in the past but why the system is almost the opposite(if not the opposite) of its original self, what we find in public schools today can perfectly describe lack of passion(from the teachers/administrators), commitment (on the part of the government) etc.
The curriculum in use is far from meeting global standards as we can easily find same essay's written same way as it was some 10 years ago.
The standard / quality of some teachers in these public schools is far behind acceptable qualities anywhere in the world, as you find teachers who are more interested in signing attendance registers than impacting knowledge, a complete overhaul of teachers might just be a preferable option for Nigeria if we really want to salvage the situation.
Learning materials are not even readily available for students/pupils to access as we have outdated books in most primary/secondary schools libraries, so how can these students even help themselves out privately?, gone are the days where some state governments assists students with free text books what do we have now, higher school fees(yet they students get nothing tangible from the government).
In Nigeria today the principals and head teachers only get serious when they get informed of a routine inspection by directors from the ministries or other visitors to the school, why don't these people pay unannounced visits to schools to ascertain the real state of the schools?
If we want to produce students, scientists,inventors we would be proud of we need to go back to the basis of implementing globally competitive standards, employ passionate professionals to manage our public schools, fix the infrastructures, equip the libraries.
It is better to run an educational system that the students pay for what they get than to run a system you call free without giving out quality education in return.
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