A Glimpse Into Tinubu’s Lagos Magic – 2

Femi Akintunde-Johnson

…As we were ‘saying’…

The clearest action of education authorities which reveals their tentative approach to the so-called holistic implementation of the 6-3-3-4 educational system is the advertised bias of Lagos State government towards the physical and infrastructural upgrade of a number of Senior Secondary Schools within the state; to the utter neglect of the more elementary and therefore more impressionable Junior Secondary level.

  At the start of this rigmarole many years ago, the chief among the commanding arguments for the establishment of 6-3-3-4 system, was the noble opportunity that vocational subjects would afford the less-than-brilliant-students-in-conventional-subjects the chance to excel in life. They would be equipped with an alternate process of knowledge acquisition through subjects like “Introduction to Technology”, “Integrated Science”, “Home Economics”, “Agricultural Science”, etc. These subjects, it was touted, would enable those students travel another route to academic excellence, and still be useful to their families and the society in establishing cottage industries, technology-driven self employment, and through self-driven creative initiatives they could then use to kick-start some sort of revolution in our hunger for technological “catch-up” with the rest of the world. We fell for those sweet sounding propositions.

 Years down the road, we have been serenaded with tales of disappearing equipment, importation of improper tools to drive the vocational curriculum. We read of crates of expensive equipment rotting away under our cruel weather, until the projects grew too elephantine and overwhelming for the new crop of operators.

Now, through the mill of government disjointed information management channels, the 6-3-3-4 system may now be surreptitiously brushed out of our education, and surely but disingenuously, a 9-3-4 system will be implanted. What is the implication of this to the diverse strands of interests within the society? Has this nebulous proposition been exhaustively discussed to avoid the wastage the earlier system had thrown up? Has anybody computed the enormous constraints this latest Makossa will inflict on private proprietors who will now have to build additional classes for children who will be forced to stay beyond Primary Six (for Primaries Seven, Eight and Nine!)? What guarantees are there that these pupils will not be using the same reading materials their predecessors in JSS 1 – 3 are using? And if no, has anybody calculated the logistic anguish and financial losses publishers of these textbooks will be subjected to?

If indeed, the 6-3-3-4 system will be changed to a rather obtuse 9-3-4 system, can anyone in the education ministry tell the parents of these students now in JSS why government collected, and indeed organized national and state common entrance examinations for primary schools pupils for admission to JSS as late as mid last year? Why have they collected, in the year 2006, another set of money (NECO and Lagos govt.) for promotional examinations into Senior Secondary School, in the same school!? Yet, we can not be surprised if they are also expected to sit for another promotional examination by individual schools? In all these, do we really bother to examine the mental state of these young Nigerians, and their hapless parents?

 As the governments play the omnipotent terrorist-father, it appears that they want us to believe that since their children no longer attend Nigerian schools, all sorts of surgical knives can be dug out for this mindless butchering of our children’s future. It also appears that it is in the matter of sharing political offices and spoils that our leaders clamour for the transparent observance of democratic ideals; no one remembers that since we are in a democracy, a whiff of it should rub on the way and manner we run our education. There is no progress made when the government runs public affairs as town development meetings – very few people are aware of actions and policies of governments in particular arrears, such that as of now, schools do not know dates for their wards’ common entrance exams! Talk less of their parents!

When I asked my daughter the date she would sit for the “practicals” she had so pestered me to pay for, she replied: “We are not sure when…they can come in anytime!” What a way to instill discipline and order, and build people of excellence.

And have you gone through the ”Cambridge” list of subjects they crawl through every school day… you wonder if you ever attended lower schools… They have 15… 17…18 subjects, with eight lessons everyday… even the Aryan craze to produce a super-race couldn’t be more tedious and disenchanting. Find time to go through your children’s notes, and you will realize why students run away from some so-called “hard” subjects to less mysterious subjects. For example, what examiner or authorizing panel makes typing (on obsolete manual typewriters) and shorthand the driving force of Business Studies? They simply drive away the children in a course every child should study to have a basic grounding in dealing with the ‘real battle’ after school. Or is it the arcane and high-falutin Yoruba subject that even students of Yoruba parentage (and, I dare say, including their parents) struggle hopelessly to understand? What is the hope for non-Yoruba speaking children who are supposed to cross-fertilize through the barriers erected by language differences? The situation appears hopelessly stacked against these little souls.

 It therefore seems to me that the exigencies of surviving on the political firmament has toughened our political leaders and their appointed civil-servants, such that speculation and subterfuge have been fine-tuned as state policies in administering education, as well as many areas of our public business. One will not be entirely surprised if this article is turned upside down, and its content splashed around as tantrums of a paid political hack, or worse still, an adjunct of shadowy opponents sponsored by “Abuja”. It does not matter; all I ask is: give my daughter a chance to enjoy her growth, and exposure to some sort of quality education… Do not collapse the system and her ambition before you fade into your well-appointed cocoons, in a few years. Stop this meanness.

fajalive1@gmail.com | 08033150547 (WhatsApp Only).