Schools of Tamba []]I]

The schools of Tamba are today not quite unlike the Tamba Well; and even though the colonial Resident Administrator is no longer resident in the village, his successor today comes from there. But of late, both the school and the well have been children-free-they no more go to school here, nor do they fetch water […]

The schools of Tamba are today not quite unlike the Tamba Well; and even though the colonial Resident Administrator is no longer resident in the village, his successor today comes from there. But of late, both the school and the well have been children-free-they no more go to school here, nor do they fetch water from that most potable source of all colonial wells. The task before Sokoto State Governor Aminu Waziri Tambuwal [who comes from Tamba Well] is to try to get children back to the former, with the expectation that they may hopefully make the later trips to the latter unnecessary. As we all know, everything depends on education.
Education is acquiring the ability to know what to do in any given situation; while knowledge is actually doing it. Thus, when Abraham Lincoln said if you gave him six hours to chop down a tree, he would spend the first fours sharpening the axe; he was telling you that, having lived in a log cabin, he was educated about felling trees.  <http://workinghumor.com/quotes/education.shtml>Someone with knowledge of trees-and sufficiently learned about felling them-would have just cut out the entire flourish and cut the damn thing down. Because desperate measures require desperate remedies, and for the people of Sokoto State it all came as a surprise goron Sallah.
Concerned about falling enrolment in Sokoto schools, the governor sent a bill before the state House of Assembly asking for powers to prosecute any parent in the state who refused to send his child to school. ‎The governor made this known while addressing religious, traditional and political leaders who had paid a courtesy call on him during the last Eid el-Fitr celebrations. And no one would be spared, he said.
 Obviously, something drastic needs to be done because education is in real crisis in this country. Approximately one third of the enrolment deficit in Sub-Saharan Africa is found in Nigeria and Ethiopia, each with more than seven million children out of school; and in both countries, standards are so low that more than half of those in school leave without learning any basic skill. And Sokoto is one of the more backward states in the country today; and there is not a single state in the North that is anywhere near the ideal state, in spite of the masterful not-fully burnt-out effort made by the Kano State Ministry of Education under Professor Ibrahim Ayagi.
It is criminal to oppose education, and government will be complicit if it closes its eyes to what opponents of education are doing and getting away with it. They can’t possibly have any reason for what they are doing. While western education does confer some reprehensible qualities on its recipients, it is by no means solely to blame for the fall in the moral tone of society; and parents in Sokoto and elsewhere must wake up to the reality and stop dragging their areas down with their unprofitable iconoclasm. They should learn to cure themselves of this indefensible fear, and get rid of this long-lasting obscurantism in their attitude to education. It is this attitude that informs, spawns and sustains parent-assisted school avoidance and truancy; but it is self-defeating in the narrow sense and, in the wider national context, it is downright criminal and should be made justiciable.
There are in our midst many so-called scholars [apparently] learned in the Islamic sciences who are more corrupt than the Western-educated; but we have never heard our elders refusing to send their children to Qur’anic schools on account of this.
Elders and government officials worried about failing standards of morality often forget that the best and most effective school for inculcating moral and ethical values in upcoming generations is the example that they are busy setting and the moral leadership that they are failing to give. And nothing in this world can remedy or alter this immoral, unethical and unaccountable national conduct and attitude until leaders at all levels stop giving this example of corruption in public life and moral depravity in social conduct.
And here is a backward nation that is being pulled back. While the world is cultivating a knowledge economy, it is ignorance that is allowed to determine the pace of progress or, more correctly, retrogression going on here. What is needed in the education sector is not just a campaign to get children in school. The sector needs a revolution.
Clearly, Nigeria needs to invest more in education, preferably up to 30 per cent of the national budget, but, in any case, not less than 25 per cent of it. But it is not the matter of increasing sectoral allocation that is crucial here; it is the question of whether the nation puts its money where its mouth is.
There is a need for greater inequity in deciding the investment in education. This generation will have betrayed its people if ten years hence a child should go without education on account of inability to pay school fees or because of a lack of school to attend or a classroom in which to receive instruction or because the ignorance of parents or the laxity of a government to enforce the accepted wisdom. This nation must change that fact that a person’s educational achievement must be dependent on his socioeconomic background; and it must improve the chances for all those excluded because of poverty, distance, neglect or policy of indifference.
In addition, the issue of corruption in education-in its system of procurement, in its delivery and in its examinations-must be decisively tackled. The content and quality of education must also be addressed as a matter of great priority. And in order to get the best out of teachers, the issue of their qualification, training, retraining to acquire 21th century skills and the issue of their welfare must be given prompt attention.
And in order to keep the pupils and students brought to school there, state governments, especially those of them in the North, must immediately do away with all school fees, and give the issue of student scholarship for higher education greater attention than the security threats that don’t exist or the so-called security votes that are routinely misappropriated.
But the problem of education is not just getting the kids to school and keeping them there; because, there is no point arresting parents over child truancy if no quality, worthwhile teaching is taking place in schools, or if no moral and physical training is taking place there. Meanwhile, the whole world has moved on into new territory.
The world is pursuing a knowledge economy and some in Nigeria are pursuing one of ignorance. And what is a knowledge economy? It has been defined as an economy “in which the generation and exploitation of knowledge has come to play the predominant part in the creation of wealth. It is not simply about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge; it is also about the most effective use and exploitation of all types of knowledge in all manner of economic activity.”
It is an economy where knowledge is at the heart of value added: it is an input in its own right and a business output in the international economic equation; it is the key component of an economy in which intellectual ability has gained greater prominence than the usual factors of production from natural resources. The triad of men, money and materiel-the economic factors of production-have been transformed been beyond recognition, from agrarian economy’s agricultural inputs, to industrial economy’s capital and labour, to the service sector of post-industrial society, and, finally, to knowledge and innovation of the new knowledge economy.
It is knowledge of all kinds-but chiefly science, technology, engineering and innovation-that has replaced economic factors of production; knowledge the acquisition of which begins at good primary schools, continues at higher levels in secondary and tertiary institutions, and is tested, extended, adapted and changed in scientific laboratories devoted to research and development; knowledge on which the props of the modern economy have come to totally depend in a transformation from which no nation can possibly excuse itself or escape its embrace.
The whole international economic equation has been rewritten at a time when Nigeria is yet to grasp and read and internalize the previous one. The economic advantage that nations seek today is no longer Ricardian comparative advantage: it is competitive advantage that only comes with not just with mere economic efficiency, but with mastery over scientific and technological innovativeness. No country can get this without giving priority to education-science, technology, engineering and mathematics. This is the only path that will lead this or any nation to true greatness; but its people are battling over oil, while oil and more oil will only fuel corruption here and make international oil companies that much richer there.
But while some oppose education with a drive for avoidance posited on ignorance, communal narrow-mindedness and an inexplicable inability to understand today’s world, some others are silently stifling education on the altar of science and technology and a narrow-mindedness none too different.