Formal Western education as introduced by our colonial masters and missionaries had always been geared towards a purpose. Missionary education was to produce catechists and ultimately gave us Bishop Ajayi Crowther. Early colonial education produced middle-level manpower for the budding civil service and ultimately the late Simeon Adebo.
The greatest calamity to befall Nigerian education was best captured by Professor Joel Babatunde Babalola, a Professor of Education, in his inaugural lecture, where he said, “Nigerian universities produce tankers rather than thinkers.” He also said, “…Nigerian graduates cannot interpret life situations in light of the knowledge they acquire. Once they are challenged with problems outside their comfort zones, they are lost, as if they never attended university.
In universities, it’s all about buildings and structures. From multimillion naira gates to flashy buildings with no real sublime substance inside of them. In other words, we have been addressing the shell or form leaving behind the substance or essence of education. This includes how students are taught, what they are taught and ultimately who teaches them. These have not received the attention they deserve.
We grew up with bulky phones in our homes. Only American police officers use phones in their vehicles. This was in the ’60s. Now I am thinking of video conferencing from my car. This is the progression you get from societies that nurture their youth to think. Here, if you teach wrong and irrelevant materials, the students suck and sock it up and regurgitate for you at exams. If a student faults his lecturer’s material, he or she is failed. Write appropriate information, not in your lecturer’s notes and you are scored zero.
More than half our student population think in their mother tongue or pidgin English so if we want a thinking nation, we must go back to instructions in the mother tongue. What we lost by debasing mother tongue and calling it vernacular is enormous and is up for discussion for another day. Suffice to say that instructing science in this vernacular ‘culturises’ science and makes it much of our own. Now, it is called western education.
Una no go dieeeeeee well nifaa