http://www.punchng.com/Articl.aspx?theartic=Art201107164372853


I read an article today that really had a profound effect on me. The story was told of a fifth grader that was once asked to define what it means to be educated. This kid got on her feet, chuckled and defined an educated man as ‘one who never does any work.’ As I ponder over the content of this discourse, I came to realise this kid unconsciously embodied in her answer a stingy blatant truth. The article goes further to explain that the biggest and best part of life lie in supplying yourself the things you need and to be able to earn a living is quite as necessary as getting education. This, in a way, emphasises the need for a curriculum that will embrace earning a living and mental growth and have them move together. It stresses that the best way to learn to be useful is to be useful. To take a young man from life for some four to six years and send him to college in order to educate him for life that he may thereafter be useful is to run a grave risk that you will not get him back into life.

As much as I believe education is so vital to development, I also subscribe to the idea of men earning a living while getting the education because it’s like the reason our colleges are constantly graduating incompetent people is our inability to inculcate doing things with talking and formulating theories about them. In a country like ours that pays so much lip service to education, the situation is even a far cry from what obtains in some other parts of the world.

Our schools and colleges churn out en masse ‘half baked’ or in some cases, ‘unbaked’ graduates year in, year out. These graduates have to compete for the very few available jobs in the market. As a result of the large turnout, employers have to resort to unrealistic standards during recruitment in some cases. Some are eventually recruited by whatever means and a larger percentage then left to roam the streets looking for non-existing jobs. Their obvious flawed education leads to inability to direct their energies into useful channels while feeding their expanding minds in schools thus reducing their chances of taking their destinies into their own hands, for the man who can weld life and education is actually the one that has ‘real education.’

I have always argued that the reason a substantial percentage of the movers and shakers of our world are without college degrees is simply because life, which is greater than college, reviews your theoretical education, quietly ignores it and then tests your requisite ability to apply such knowledge to practical issues. This, I guess, is life’s way of making us to realise that our vicious belief that education is one thing and life is another is null and void. There is nothing wonderful about a college professor except, perhaps, his density in an area of his speciality outside of which he is likely to be very lopsided. This explains why some of these professors are even deemed unfit to hold administrative positions in their respective colleges. Real education entails not just being knowledgeable about specific subjects, but also being able to practically adapt such acquired insights to solving life’s unending puzzles.

The Nigerian situation is such a pathetic case in question. Our education is in shambles. Schools are not conducive to learning. Basic infrastructure, materials and equipment are practically non-existent and when they exist, they are outdated. Our single effort at combining talking, learning and doing things, the Industrial Training Scheme is grossly inadequate and poorly coordinated. Students spend a huge chunk of the period looking for placements into industries that eventually absorb them for maybe three or four months and they end up learning little or nothing at all. Most of these companies, maybe due to the students’ incompetence and/or their trying to cut down on idle time, do not even allow students to handle their equipment long enough to grasp thr operating and maintenance procedures as the case may be. There is, therefore, an urgent need to completely overhaul our system of education. We need to provide infrastructure that will enhance learning, develop curricula that will plug all loopholes in the current ones and then inculcate financial and entrepreneurial/on-the-job training such that our schools will develop men big enough to captain both education and industry. Providing ‘real education’ where schools’ curricula have worked directly in line with education will positively transform our socio-economic national life and consequently place us in an enviable position among the comity of nations.