Restoring values, virtues and Ekiti spirit into Education – A General Appraisal.
One of the lectures delivered at Igbole Ekiti Educational Link Forum
By Chief Anthony Adebowale Ashaolu
One will be right to assert that education has remained a continuous exercise in the life of man throughout the ages. But with content of modern education, it is classified into two major compartments:
a) Informal and formal education. Informal education is one acquired either noticed or unnoticed through parents, peers and society at large not following any organized process. Formal education is acquired through the school system under teacher/public/student interaction in the classroom.
The two systems have both values and virtues and both are supposed to work together to make a complete man/woman. Has education values? A quotation from an American educationist “Education is what remains after we have forgotten all we learnt at school” may enlighten us a little. If the belief that education is supposed to prepare children for adult life is anything to go by, it means that either consciously or otherwise education instils the discipline which has to see him through life in him. That is, education makes man polished and urbane.

Has education virtues? Let’s examine the following : Lord Brougham, a Whig lawyer and politician asserted; “Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave “ if you consider the lexicon meaning of virtue; as accordance with moral principles, conformity of behaviour or thought and good moral conduct relevant, you will agree with Lord Brougham. For this reason, when you encounter a virtuous man, your mind may go to his educational background, school passes through him as you often say.

But, what is Ekiti Spirit? Listen to the reaction of Wiston Churchill when the UK was threatened by Nazi rule “we shall not flag or fail, we shall go to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever that cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender”

I deliberately quote this long piece to demonstrate three things; viz, fighting spirit at all levels and everywhere, fortitude and optimism. My brothers and sister, this is the Ekiti Spirit of old. In addition, the Ekiti spirit includes, integrity, righteousness, brotherliness and patriotism.

The spirit made Ekiti students an object of envy and admiration in all institutions of learning throughout the world as they would always excel in any field of academic pursuit you found them. Probably because of this pride of place they acquired for themselves, they were often found flocking together. In fact, there used to be a powerful Ekiti students Union which out of austere living offered scholarship to deserving students. Funny enough, through the influence of today’s speaker, an Igbole indigene enjoyed such a scholarship. With the set-up, who was that Ekiti student who could afford to fail his examination? Failure at any level was a taboo!!!

To get the proper idea of all that is being said, let us have an illustration from our own local level. Late professor Daniel Fumilayo Ojo, aka Ojo-Ugbole was born and bred in Igbole here of very poor parentage. One way or the other, he became baptized by the Ekiti Spirit and this gave him the impetus that guided and tailored his life throughout. For instance, while preparing for the entrance examination to St Andrew’s College, Oyo, he set the prescribed syllabus for religious studies aside and studied the entire bible from Genesis to Revelation that he might answer any question should the examiners change their mind to ask question from other sections of the bible!

At the college, he was inspired by the result of Aja Nwachukwu, his senior of three years who had distinction in eight papers and his result given publicity by all Newspapers in West Africa. Ojo-Ugbole had distinction in all his eleven papers!

He had no money to buy books; He could only afford to buy a single one out of all prescribed books for each subject. Hence he was always in the bookshop to open each of such books to compare the contents with the syllabus. He was always buying the one whose contents were closest to the syllabus. Hence the myth that he studied and committed to memory all pages of books from the bookshop!!

St Andrew’s college ran a four-year programme, He studied the whole syllabuses within three years and packed all books up to face preparation for Yaba College and General Certificate of Education examinations. The result of the three examinations came in quick succession during that fateful year and he passed at distinction grade in all.
This became the talk of the entire community. “Se o a yo mowe, ko o mowe to’ojo-Ugbole” He later went to the United Kingdom to study and he made first class honours in geo-physics. He ended being the first African professor of Geo-physics!

This story is similar to that of many other towns and villages in Ekiti and the tradition went on for quite a long time before our society became more play-oriented and less work-oriented, a situation that has since been affecting the progressive measures of the values and virtues of education among us. Once this play-oriented thing brought a heavy clog on the wheel of progress of the entire exercise, one can remorsely say that the Holy Roman Empire seized to be either Holy, Roman or Empire.

But, can this be considered a total eclipse? Probably No. In the sense of the course of history, there has always been occasions of will after which thinkers often rose up to reactivate and set new and better machineries in motion. In our own case, with the emergence of Aduralere our own thinker of the day, we have to see that our own atmosphere was merely over shadowed by a passing cloud.
But the pertinent question to ask at this juncture is; are we going to allow this clarion call for the recovery of our ebbing glory to be the business of one man? If our answer is once more No; then comes a tasking challenge to the doorstep of every individual, from this moment on.

I call it a tasking challenge in the sense that the onus of the burden of this proposed new orientation rests on the shoulder of individuals and corporate bodies that will have to go back to the drawing board to take stock of his/her/their participation so far and see where things went wrong. All that is being said is that government, the teachers, parents and pupils/students have to wake up from the present slumber, adopt, adapt themselves to the old spirit of our predecessor who did us proud and even formulate through the medium of the present day advanced technology policies that will further enhance the inherited glory.

Since we have unanimously agreed to embrace the timely clarion call of the reformer in its entirety and start once more to produce more Ojo-Ugboles and the rest, you are welcome on board.

God bless.