Wanted: Educational renaissance
Education is undoubtedly one of the basic needs of man. But in the Nigerian context, it is not education, but certificate. The craze for paper certificate has become so unutterable that even our ivory towers place more importance on the grades and certificates they award rather than on the knowledge they impart. Our education system has been modeled after grades and this is disturbing.
There is much emphasis on grades than knowledge and skills. Paper certificates have taken the centre stage of the society’s value system and it has become a yardstick for measuring intellectual achievement and societal relevance. This could explain why Nigerian youths in their millions embark on a crazy chase for university admissions every year.
In the same vein, it has become a do-or-die affair even for students in secondary schools who fight tooth and nail to acquire the almighty WAEC result. I am not advocating that students should disregard or neglect their exams. Not quite! It is just that the emphasis the certificate enjoys far outweighs the actual knowledge and skill gained or learned.
This isn’t a problem with the secondary education alone. In fact, the outrageous situations are prevalent in our so-called higher institutions of learning. Over there, the quest for high cumulative grade point average has made most students to take passing exams as the ultimate. Again I am not encouraging students to fail, but the emphasis has been more on passing a course than understanding the course. I may not put all the blame on the students because the bulk of the blame is on the society who believes that the only person that can claim knowledgeable in a course is the one with a good grade and nothing less.To them, if you did not pass the course, you do not know the course, forgetting that many circumstances can lead to average performance in an examination.
To show the extent the mentality of passing exams has eaten down the fabric of our intellectual growth; students seldom ask a practical question or a world problem question for broader understanding of a real life application of a topic during lectures. Some lecturers on their own parts also contribute to the complacency towards holistic learning. One wonders: is education all about exams? Are certificates going to replace knowledge and skills? This is a question our education sector must answer, a question our society should address.
It is not surprising anyway that some students don’t attend lectures but come for exams. And some lecturers don’t come for classes but set exams. Some schools are synonymous with the tradition of lecturers resuming their lectures two weeks to exams. And everybody is expected to write and pass. Who is fooling who?
It is not surprising anyway that some students don’t attend lectures but come for exams. And some lecturers don’t come for classes but set exams. Some schools are synonymous with the tradition of lecturers resuming their lectures two weeks to exams. And everybody is expected to write and pass. Who is fooling who?
Once admitted into the university, an average Nigerian student’s focus shifts from garnering knowledge, contributing and adding values to the society, becoming a complete man, acquiring sustainable skills, to making good grades by all means and graduating as soon as possible. The tune of the music changes, as the only scent one can perceive in the school environment is social activities, exams, results and cumulative grade points.
How can we explain a situation whereby an engineering student is not exposed to the practical use of the laboratory equipment, or where the technologist manning a laboratory is ignorant of the principles of operation of the machines and the theories guiding the practicals? How can we explain to a lay man that in some Nigerian teaching hospital, palpitation exercises are carried out on women and young girls who are not pregnant, after a token have been given to them to be used in place of heavily expectant mothers.
How can we explain a situation whereby an engineering student is not exposed to the practical use of the laboratory equipment, or where the technologist manning a laboratory is ignorant of the principles of operation of the machines and the theories guiding the practicals? How can we explain to a lay man that in some Nigerian teaching hospital, palpitation exercises are carried out on women and young girls who are not pregnant, after a token have been given to them to be used in place of heavily expectant mothers.
And this is used to give “palpitation of tummy lecture” to our great future medical practitioners. How would they know how to palpitate on pregnant women when the persons they used for practical were never pregnant? The ill is everywhere, not only in the engineering and medical professions. Or how can we explain for mass communication and English graduates who cannot write a simple formal letter and corps members who could not fill their forms in the orientation camp? One needs to be in our tertiary institutions during accreditations to appreciate the horrible hocus-pocus going on there by our school administrators.
One would expect that the rate of unemployment in the country should abate owing to the increasing academic activities everywhere. But the reverse is implicitly the case, because we have paid more attention to certifications than knowledge and skill acquisition.
Therefore, there is no gainsaying that we have to change our attitudes toward education in Nigeria. It should be regarded a knowledge oriented process rather than a certificate exercise. Our schools should stop being certificate printing houses, and actually epitomize true citadels of learning. Skill acquisition programs should be encouraged and people enrolled in such programs should be given incentives. Our institutions should be more equipped for adequate learning and not mere studying. And the knowledge and skill one acquires should determine his societal relevance and not a degree or diploma.
However, the strength of the education system of any nation is not ascertained by how many certificates it issued but from the impact it has had on the societal growth and development. We need to have an educational revolution for a productive education system. And to achieve this, a change of attitude towards education is inevitable.
Kingsley just finished from Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, UNN
