Developing sound education in Nigeria
In his second term, President Muhammadu Buhari nominated nine priority areas for his administration, including, ensuring country-wide compliance with the June 12 declaration on the enforcement of free and compulsory basic education for the first 9-years of schooling, implementing advocacy and prioritizing funding to increase enrolment and completion rates in primary and secondary education, and […]
In his second term, President Muhammadu Buhari nominated nine priority areas for his administration, including, ensuring country-wide compliance with the June 12 declaration on the enforcement of free and compulsory basic education for the first 9-years of schooling, implementing advocacy and prioritizing funding to increase enrolment and completion rates in primary and secondary education, and implementing every child counts STEAM curriculum.
STEAM stands for science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics. It has always been an integral part of our educational curriculum. What however is new in STEAM now is the vigorous creative content being injected into it.
Craft from the earliest of times has been part of Nigeria’s primary school curriculum. Children in primary school had craft lessons during which they weaved mats and baskets, rolled ropes and molded pots. These crafts were the rudimentary and native technology of old. With the coming of modern technological products like matches, torchlight, the radio and the bicycle, there was a failure by primary school teachers to migrate their pupils from the primordial technology here enumerated to the modern technology also here enumerated. This wasn’t entirely surprising.
Even the primordial technology pupils were exposed to in primary school never went beyond the primary school to secondary school. In the primary school rudimentary technology was indulged in, it was carried out perfunctorily without a serious or deep sense of generating a creative mind in the pupil. It was like a story telling class the pupils were required to tell the story of the rope, the pot or the mat with their hands without their minds as they would tell the story of the hare or the tortoise with their mouths without their full minds attending.All through the decades primary school education has been on in Nigeria, there has been no deliberate effort by primary school teachers in the country to migrate STEAM to a creative and innovative level that would make good artisans of primary school pupils if not good scientists and technologists. The loop has never been jumped and so the minds of the pupils never crossed the river between primordial technology to high tech that makes the difference.
STEAM being pursued now by the Ministry of Education under Adamu Adamu aims at migrating pupils from cramming and regurgitating what exist to having creative and innovative minds that can produce new things. A program of training 948 STEM and TVET teachers nationwide has been embarked on to boost the quality of primary education in the country.STEM teachers are of course teachers of science, technology, engineering and mathematics while TVET teachers are teachers of technical and vocational education. This program is about retraining the trainer. The retaining has imagination and creativity as its focal point. For long too long,education in Nigeria from the primary school to the university has been about cramming what has been thought out and created elsewhere and trying to apply it the way it has been handed down. No rethinking and no scrutiny of what is given. The STEM and TVET program currently prosecuted by the Ministry of Education is set to change the education narrative at this front.
When retrained, teachers of science, technology, engineering and mathematics should be able to make the nation’s children even at the primary school think and probe into issues, not merely lap them mindlessly. The future, indeed the present as it appears to us belong to artisans – people who can repair, fix or make things; not people with degrees and diplomas. Certificates are papers that don’t make things happen the way trained hands do.
The ministry has also embarked on training 37,000 teachers nationwide through a Strengthening of Mathematics and Science Education (SMASE) program. It recognizes the teacher as the critical agent that can make the difference in the education of pupils and places emphasis on him. At the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), a whole department is dedicated to teachers’ professional development. 10 percent of the not less than 2 percent consolidated revenue grant to UBEC is allocated to teachers’ professional development. Classrooms and chairs don’t teach. Teachers do. So as attention is being given to renovation and construction of classrooms, buying of desks and lockers, perhaps more attention should be given to the quality of teachers.
The ministry has also organized National Junior Engineers Technologists and Scientists’ competition in Lagos to spark interest in science and technology among young people. In the same vein, a STEM camp for 600 female students was organized in Lagos to generate intellectual interaction among science and technology inclined children. All these initiatives of the ministry aim at shoring up science and technology critical to national development in the minds of young Nigerians.
Every child counts because the child that does not count may be the one that will pull the trigger or detonate the bomb in an insurgent attack. Perhaps at no time in history has the need been felt for every child to be educated as now. The reason is clear: To function with dignity and productively in the world today, one needs a good result-oriented education. Without such education, a person out of frustration and a sense of vengeance may drift to terror to square things up with society.
Udeh writes from Abuja