Tackling the challenges of a failing educational system
In closer scrutiny, the reasons for this total collapse become even more obvious. Political intonations in matters that were supposed to be handled with professional considerations and an altruistic bent ensured a swift decline that successive governments have not been able to correct to this day. Lack of administrative dedication and an absence of candor […]
In closer scrutiny, the reasons for this total collapse become even more obvious. Political intonations in matters that were supposed to be handled with professional considerations and an altruistic bent ensured a swift decline that successive governments have not been able to correct to this day. Lack of administrative dedication and an absence of candor on the parts of a stifled professional base have also contributed in no small ways to entrench a system of blind followership by an academic class that seems to have been stricken by a sense of levity. With this attitude, the downward spiral of this sector persists.
To be fair, discussions on educational reforms persist to this day and have been kept in the front burner of discourse on issues of national importance. Many concerned academics have called the failure in the educational sector Nigeria’s greatest impending disaster and they are not wrong. In thirty years, the public pre-tertiary school system is almost moribund, stricken by a combination of debilitating ineptitude and malignant maladministration. The absence of educational facilities and corresponding infrastructure have made the public schools little more than store houses for the maligned of society where little or no education is imparted. There are still many who will remember, with some reverence, the greatness of the public school system up to the late seventies and the immense demand for educational excellence imposed on pupils. This demand was a driving force that ensured a desire to excel beyond the average.
The infiltration of the educational sector by unregulated private institutions is indicative of government’s inability to cope with the piling burden of providing qualitative educational services. This is most evident at the pre-tertiary level. With the constant growth in private sector pre-tertiary education, there have been a number of devastating repercussions for the public school system. First, the growth in private institutions has become a major pull for academic human resource base and this persistently creates a problem of lack of valuable professional hands for public schools; secondly, education has become more of a financial venture rather than a humanitarian duty. The consequence of this is the constantly rising cost of education which has gradually created palpable signs of class categorization.
While teachers in public schools enjoy better remuneration in comparison to the teachers in private institutions, there are administrative and infrastructural constraints that stifle professional challenges for the teachers in the public school system due to lack of funding and the provision of basic teaching aids that would help the teachers to improve professionally. There is also the lack of professional supervision and monitoring in the public school system that has given free run to unprofessional practices. Many teachers have always complained that these administrative failures tend to portray them as unproductive and places the burden of responsibility for the failure of pupils on them quite wrongfully.
In many instances, this burden is not wrongfully placed; on several trips to public schools, it is common to see classes where teachers are surreptitiously absent and students are given free run on disruptive and anarchic behaviors. In many instances, the teachers show a total lack of grammatical grasp and sometimes appalling ignorance of the subjects they teach. Teachers who recognise their worth and intend to make an impact naturally tilt towards the private institutions where educational materials are better provided.
Where these limitations do not apply, there is the political intonation; Nigeria in the twenty first century is still a nation run on ethnic steam and the political implications of this is exposed in demarcation of ethnic lines in state civil service jobs. How do we explain the denial of jobs to qualified teachers who have lived in a particular state for the better part of their lives based on their ethnic differences and are then forced to relocate to other states in search of employment? The failure to look into this administrative failure ensures the persistence of an unworkable civil service.
Nigerians are grappling with excessively exploitative school fees and ancillary costs for services that are essential but not worth the values placed on them and imposed on parents by private educational institutions. Most private schools have gone beyond the reach of the average Nigerian and as a consequence, have done very little to uplift the general population from an educational slump. Over the years, the focus of a number of these schools seem to have been directed at the upper echelons of the Nigerian society and their evaluation of the success of their services are more predicated on their financial gains rather than the mental improvement of their wards.
The Nigerian government’s strides at rectifying this sector continues to experience glitches imposed by its own shortcomings. Accounting for the massive investments alleged to have been put in the educational sector remains a major constraint. Even as federal, state and local governments persist in literally filling a hollow bottle, they reject the possibility of attempting daring programs that are both humane and non implicative. For example, the government has consistently subsidised public education even as the facts show that maladministration will continue to mar the structures that oversee this sector.
Government may begin to see more results if it choses to divert some of these subsidies to private pre-tertiary institutions in the form of grants that will help these institutions cushion the effects of the massive cost implications of running productive institutions. The intention is to bring down the cost of tuition in these institutions and make them more accessible to the public in the interim while government strives to rectify the failures in an almost moribund public sector, a temporary emergency plan of sorts to provide good education for the wards of the average civil servant who struggles to cope with the constraints of a minimum wage that affords little.
Ejiro Barrett is based in Abuja and can be reached on [email protected]