WE ARE ALL OUT-OF-SCHOOL

Josef Omorotionmwan canvasses urgent need to invest more in education

In times like these it is not easy to forget the old argument that has still not been resolved.  It is an argument between the Ancient and the Modern. In Ancient, the young have grown. He recollects, with nostalgia, that when he was in standard one of the time, he could write letters that moved. In Arithmetic, he was already getting immersed in the Lacomb and was beginning to solve complex problems. 

But in the Modern, the young were still growing. Even in Primary VI, some who attempted to write letters had the letters returned to the sender because they could not address the envelopes adequately.

 The Ancient quickly concluded that the standard of education was falling. The Modern retorted that the standard of education was not falling. Rather, the content of education was changing. There are many problems which a 10-year-old modern child can easily solve and at that age, the Ancient had no clue.

 In those days, to be a Lawyer, you were required to be properly schooled in Latin, Greek, and English Language, and the rest plus the fact that you had to empty the Complete Works of Shakespeare into your small head.

But today, while knowledge of the foregoing would be an added advantage, all that is required to study Law is proficiency in the English Language. In the remote past, you had to cast some five foolscap pages of jaw-breaking figures in Book-keeping and Accounts off your head lest your Trial Balance would not balance. Today, at the touch of a button, the answer will appear, why will you be punishing yourself, racking your brain? All you need now is to know the applicable formula and you are good to go – Just put in the figures and touch the button! Things are changing.

Nothing here vitiates the fact that there are problems besetting our educational system in Nigeria. We are told that more than 20 million out-of-school children are in the country. This figure is staggering. That is one way of exploring why contestants in the forth-coming general elections are being confronted to tell Nigerians what they will do about the ugly situation if they win the elections.

We should be looking at education in every facet of life – not just within the narrow confines of children. As staggering as the figure for out-of-school children looks, it is still the tip of the iceberg when applied to the whole population. In the paragraphs that follow, we intend to show that more citizens in other segments of our society are constructively out of school.

We shall look at rural secondary schools. In Edo State, when Comrade Adams Aliyu Oshiomhole became Governor, all the secondary schools were virtually comatose. He quickly embarked on revamping the schools both in urban and rural areas. He invested so heavily in the schools that they even looked better than some universities. Each class was fitted with state-of-the-art furniture, five ceiling fans, floor and wall tiles and the rest. The Principal’s Office and the Staff Common Rooms were fully airconditioned. These were some of the contents of the Red Roof Revolution and it was a delight to behold. There were cases where some students refused to go home after class because such comforts were lacking in their homes. 

 Life soon returned to public schools in Edo State. Parents withdrew their children from private schools to the renovated Government Schools. This did not last for long. 

 Whether by accident or by design, the collapse of all the rural schools did not take any time after Comrade Oshiomhole’s departure. The rural schools were denied teachers. A big school with about 500 students on enrollment in the Junior and Senior schools would just have one Principal and one Teacher. 

 No learning is going on in the rural schools. They are fully captured in school enrollment. The students do many things in the name of school. Some of them have their big bags. Every morning, they put one exercise book, a hoe, and a cutlass in the bag. Instead of heading for class, they head to the bush to search for rabbits.

While available records continue to show those students as being in school, they are OUT-OF-SCHOOL!

In the final year, things are neatly arranged so that the students come out with flying colours, with A1 and A2 in all the subjects, occasionally punctuated with C4 in a few subjects. These things are happening in many states and by the time the actual figures are known, the number of out-of-school children is perhaps doubled. That’s the making of Magic Centres all over the place.

Year after year, these half-baked products stream into our urban areas in the name of going for further studies. A vast number of them cannot gain admission and they are not employable. They are out-of-school and out-of-work. They form a hidden population that is not captured in any bracket. This category is dangerous. If we think that the out-of-school children we failed to educate yesterday are contributing to the insecurity problem of today, those in the out-of-school youth category must constitute a time bomb, waiting to explode!

No investment in education can be lost. We must quickly begin to mop up these half-baked ones to involve them in skill acquisition of sorts! To continue to ignore them is to turn the entire bush into snakes.

What of our tertiary institutions that are on strike most of the time? Are the students in school or out of school? Any answer here is correct. It is like the bottle is half full or half empty. 

The adult segment of our population is out of school. In the Second Republic, there was this Adult Education Programme that gave adults who missed education at first an opportunity to get some education. Today, that program is no more. It should be brought back. 

 Perhaps as a way of leaving for last that which affects us most, it is time to remind us that on Computer Literacy, we are all Out-Of-School. This is a world that is computer-driven.

Whereas the rest of the civilized world has since realized the importance of computers and has therefore exposed their citizens to computers from very early in life, we have ignored this aspect all along. In fact, for too long, any young person seen with a laptop in Nigeria was regarded as a common criminal and a yahoo-yahoo person. We have, therefore, been left far behind. We are playing catch-up and catch up, we must!

 All these can be achieved by declaring a state of emergency on our current educational system. It can’t be done otherwise!

 Education is the main hub around which a nation’s development revolves, no nation ever gets it right by paying lip service to its education!

Omorotionmwan writes from Canada