After reading through some of the threads on this forum i realised most Nigerians still havent identified the root of our problems, which for me is funny. Like the topic implies the loss of our morals and values is what encompasses all the other problems we can think of in this country. Corruption has become a part of us, giving bribes is now a norm and it is done openly, people don't feel bad cheating one another, u find it difficult taking action when u are wronged instead u talk, we do more of talking about things we ourselves can't do than action. its funny because if we do a poll on this thread about what we will do if we are in the position of power u'll hear a lot of interesting comments, but in all honesty how many of us can put our money where our mouth is and say we can really make a change. my people talk is cheap and we need to stop complaining and take things the way they are and accept it or act to show we don't accept it. How many of us has taken a lead on his own and has done something for the society without waiting for the government? how many of us has challenged the system on his own for the sole purpose of making a change?

Yes i know the government is bad and corrupt, so what do u want to do about it? and please dont tell me act? if u act lets see how many people will agree with u and if they do agree how many will follow u when the time comes to make a stance. the fact that u can elect/ have a councillor in your area and not know what the guy is doing shows laxity in your path so at the end of the day u don't have a right to complain about good governance because we are the government and we are the ones that can make a change.

personally for me it think for there to be lasting positive change we really need to look inwards and stop blaming people for the country's misfortune, and believe me it starts from the home i.e the family, gone were the days when parents take pride in following their children's education instead now we have them trying to assist them in cheating through school either directly or indirectly, cheat their way into getting gainful employment etc. the motto now in our country is the end justifies the means so we have gone back to the 17/ 18 century of the western world, where the man with the gun makes the rules. it should start at the bottom from the home to the community where we live in, believe me from there it will get to the top.

can anybody tell me if they still teach religion and moral instruction in schools most of us just pay lip service to this corruption of a thing i tell u when the chips are down most of us would be found wanting. over to u guys

you cant teach or preach God in schools. u cant beat and spank, , the world is producing whimps who are selfish,rude and lazy, lack of moral values because parents hands have been tired.

can u believe that the gov. arrested a parent for teaching her child sex education? schools and gov are now taking over child development , lord have mercy, nation of whimpssssss

what are you talking about human nature is the same everywhere. Westerners would behave the same way Nigerians are behaving if they were in the same situation we were in. In western nations where people have a lot, there is still corruption, now imagine if they lived here in naija where everything is set up to frustrate you into failure and were it doesn't pay to be honest and to do things the hard way.
You said parents help students cheat here in naija, what else do you expect when you have a pathetic horrible educational system where students have to write an exam they've never been taught before, how do you expect to give students a uniform exam when there is no uniform syllabus or worse still there is no oversight over the educational system? How do you expect a child who went to some Mudasiru Fatai comprehension school where you have 200 students in one classroom with no teacher at all to write WAEC and pass? Look its the situation that brings out the worst in naija people, I agree we need to reeducate our kids on the values of honesty and not cutting corners, but when you live in a country where you can't pursue your dreams or where have a system of corruption at the top, it trickles right down to the subjects below.

davidif:

what are you talking about human nature is the same everywhere. Westerners would behave the same way Nigerians are behaving if they were in the same situation we were in. In western nations where people have a lot, there is still corruption, now imagine if they lived here in naija where everything is set up to frustrate you into failure and were it doesn't pay to be honest and to do things the hard way.
You said parents help students cheat here in naija, what else do you expect when you have a pathetic horrible educational system where students have to write an exam they've never been taught before, how do you expect to give students a uniform exam when there is no uniform syllabus or worse still there is no oversight over the educational system? How do you expect a child who went to some Mudasiru Fatai comprehension school where you have 200 students in one classroom with no teacher at all to write WAEC and pass? Look its the situation that brings out the worst in naija people, I agree we need to reeducate our kids on the values of honesty and not cutting corners, but when you live in a country where you can't pursue your dreams or where have a system of corruption at the top, it trickles right down to the subjects below.

davidif
well said bro!! . . . this is exactly how it is. .

are we now saying we are doomed in this respect and nothing is going to change, are we now saying as a people we have accepted this as a way of life, are we now saying when people want to talk about us as a people the description would not be complete until the negative words like corruption, greed, injustice are used to describe us

yes i know these things exist everywhere in the world even in the US though i ve not been there so i cant say 4 sure, but i want to believe its a global thing, but then what now makes these people different dont u have overpopulated schools in the US and Britain, dont they have corrupt leaders in these countries, they do but i can tell u most of them dont compromise for as little as a piece of crumb like we do here, the stakes are much higher, all im saying which i know u have agreed with me is for any form of change to happen we need to form a resistance to all the hardship we face and as u said it tricklesd down to the bottom and im saying we at the bottom would now change it from there and take it to the top, instead of always blaming the top,

lets see what we can do as individuals personally on our own to make a change, its more like starting achain "PAY IT FORWARD" the reward for doing good is for whoever u have helped to help someone else in return and not u necessarily expecting something in return. No be by going to churcha and mosque o my brother, most Nigerians are just hypocrites cant practice what they preach, we are more like do as i say dont do as i do,

believe me it doesnt werk(work) for me, dats my take.

@don1demaco
Don't get me wrong sir, i agree with everything you said, i don't mean to justify corruption and dishonesty, i am just saying its not only isolated to Nigeria but every country in the world. Situations usually bring out the best and the worst in human beings. This trend of corruption is not only isolated to only poor countries like Nigeria, but just about every country on earth. I have a friend from the Ukraine and from what i hear from him its much worse in his country. The same goes here for every country in the world and every human being. Human nature is capable of good and evil (especially if its in an inhumane society).

Like i said earlier, human nature is the same everywhere, here in yanki, i've heard of some students who cheat in high school and at times in college but those are isolated incidents. What baffles me is that with the fact that the US high school system is much easier (on the contrary, college is much incredibly harder) you still hear of cases were students get involved in dishonest acts, now imagine if this kids were to write WAEC or JAMB that they've never been taught.

Concerning what you wrote about overcrowded classes here, i can honestly say that there are no secondary school classes with a 100 students in the class here at all, in fact, there are regulations against that. Also, the overall system here is designed for you to succeed, if a student or a school is doing horrible, they do everything to make sure the school improves its performances. Also, the most conducive environment for a student to learn anything is in a conducive and nuturing environment, how could you learn anything when the teacher doesn't even know squat (or in some cases doesn't show up at all) or where you have 300 students in the class (17 should be the max. capacity)? and please don't even get me started about employment.

I don't have much to say here because it would be the same old story of bad leadership. I believe a leader is given the power to probe any unseriousness when it comes to public service.
I spent my first two years of high school in New Era Girls Secondary School (a public school), I can rememeber it was only two pages of notes I wrote in Social Studies in three terms because the teacher showed up whenever he liked (let me not even talk about the strikes I witnessed). We can talk about morals all we want but if the head (government) is contaminated the tail would not be productive. The kind of attitude my social studies teacher displayed would have been dealt with if the head (principal) was interested. The principal would have been dealt with if the minister of education concerned himself with his job. Is it that trying for governors, local government chairmen and all other thieving posts to do good for our schools? One thing I know for sure is that JAMB is a bastard.

davidif:

@don1demaco
Like i said earlier, human nature is the same everywhere, here in yanki, i've heard of some students who cheat in high school and at times in college but those are isolated incidents. What baffles me is that with the fact that the US high school system is much easier (on the contrary, college is much incredibly harder) you still hear of cases were students get involved in dishonest acts, now imagine if this kids were to write WAEC or JAMB that they've never been taught.

Concerning what you wrote about overcrowded classes here, i can honestly say that there are no secondary school classes with a 100 students in the class here at all, in fact, there are regulations against that. Also, the overall system here is designed for you to succeed, if a student or a school is doing horrible, they do everything to make sure the school improves its performances. Also, the most conducive environment for a student to learn anything is in a conducive and nuturing environment, how could you learn anything when the teacher doesn't even know squat (or in some cases doesn't show up at all) or where you have 300 students in the class (17 should be the max. capacity)? and please don't even get me started about employment.

You are absolutely correct. My brother that hated and couldn't solve maths in Nigeria is doing very well in Maths now in the US. The educational system in the US cannot and should not be compared with the mockery in Nigeria. In the US the teachers really want you to pass, but in Nigeria I heard things like "If you like pass, if you like don't pass, Ki lo n ko mi be. "

consumerism is wots killing us here in naija. everybody wants to own, nobody wants to work for it, really bend their backs and grunt and sweat. why? cos acquisition is its own reward and not honest means. yes corruption prevails elsewhere in the world but very few are brazen about it. looters of public funds and corrupt CEOs do not ride around in expensive cars and live in ridiculously huge mansions in apparent pride of their "accomplishments". no, elsewhere corrupt politicians hide their filthy lucre and keep a low profile cos they know the system was not designed to support such odious deeds. unlike in nigeria where a govenrment officiial officially earning less than 120,000 a month can send all his kids to reputable colleges, build obscene palaces and own a fleet of expensive cars before our very eyes and is never corrupt until EFCC says so. nobody questions how he could obviously live above his means, and if you do ask they'd probably tell you "he was a onetime minister/ his brother runs NNPC/ he is the director of xx/ he is a senator", and then you nod and say "Ah!", cos as a nigerian that explains it all. the system was designed to allow that.

well said

@stillwater
Thank you jare, when i was in naija, i wasn't any good at math and i hated it so much, but when i came to yanki, math became my best subject especially Calculus (CALCULUS!!!) of all subjects, in fact, you cover so much information here in one semester (4 months) than you would cover from SSI -SS3 . Also, teachers would try there very best so that you succeed, they are so nuturing and concerned but in naija its the opposite, imagine a teacher flogging a child simply because the poor kid doesn't understand the subject, then you have the verbal abuse (coconut head, olodo, you'll never amount to anything). Some students can't learn in an atmosphere like that (some students do, but not all), some students need to be encouraged and helped. Another thing is that here you can bother your teacher any time you feel like concerning homework, in naija teacher would yell at you (how many times do i have to explain to you? are you deaf you coconut head) or at times, they would even flog  you, and you wonder why our public schools produces touts and and "area boys" instead of Albert Einsteins and Nobel Prize winners.

In naija, teachers create an atmosphere of fear so the students are even scared to ask questions for fear of being made fun of or snapped at out of impatience by the teacher (what's wrong with you, or are you blind) , that's why a lot of students are left behind. An atmosphere like this where all array of abuses are rained down ofn the kids definitely can't bring out the best in the students. Another point is that majority of the students like the late bloomers (it takes them a while to reach there potential), the fearful, insecure and timid ones need special one on one attention with caring and nuturing teachers, this is where the teachers need to make the subject interesting and apealing to those students.

As a result of the lack of administrative oversight, some of the teachers are not assesed based on the performance of there students and worse of all, some don't even know there stuff: my english teacher couldn't speak English very well and i went to a private school, now imagine a student in some Government day primary school ("ki lo luwa e fe ko". The teachers should have a minimum qualifications of a masters degree if not a PhD and a teaching certificate to teach in our primary and  secondary schools just like Singapore where the best students in the universities are hired to teach in primary school that's why they have the best educational system in the world, this would be a better alternative than some HND holder or some guy who cheated his way through college. This process of recruiting the best students to teach in our primary schools would definitely help especially in places like Southern, Eastern and Northern Nigeria where the standard of education is still lagging behind compared to western Nigeria, i am not saying that Western Nigeria is good at all, but i went to school in southern naija and trust its much worse than those yoruba states.[/b]