Way to improve education in Nigeria
Education is the “pillar of development and determinant of technological, political and socio-economic growth and development of any nation”.
The ministries of education should provide adequate infrastructure such as electricity, pipe borne water class room blocks/lecture halls in our schools. Our schools’ laboratories, workshops and vocational centres should be adequately equipped with the necessary modern facilities. As this cannot be achieved by the government all alone, there is need for all stakeholders as well as corporate bodies to support in executing such projects. Current and relevant textbooks and internet facilities should be provided in our schools to allow for easy teaching and learning.
One of the many ways to improve falling standard of education in the country is to return our schools, especially secondary schools, to the missionaries. Since the foundation of a child’s education is built from the primary and secondary schools, there is an urgent need to return schools at those levels to the missionaries. When our schools were run by the missionaries, the standard obtained then was equal to the standards obtainable in any part of the globe. The government should in the interest of our educational development and improvement return our schools to their original owners which are the missionaries.
The quality of teachers in our schools across the board today is diminishing, as many of them are employed basis on “who you know” at the expense of merit, also most of the teacher's in our school today did not even go through training in education, they obtained B SC certificate instead of the minimum requirements of NCE or B Ed with makes their involvement in the educational field unprofessional and mostly unproductive because they r not trained for that. To check the quality of teachers in our schools, the government as well as education stakeholders in the private institutions must firstly take teacher education seriously so as to produce standard professional teachers to uphold the value of the Profession. And also set up quality assurance committee on the conduct of periodic test and screenings for teachers to ascertain the quality of education they impact on our students. Teachers should be encouraged to strive to improve professionally on their teaching skills and academic qualifications in order to meet current global teaching standards. Training and retraining exercises should also be organized for teachers to acquaint them with the ever evolving and ever improving uses of relevant materials and teaching tools that will help improve their teaching.
Another way to improve our educational standard is through regular review on the awareness and enforcing compliance to our code of conduct in our schools. Many teachers hardly follow our codes of conduct because they are probably not aware of what those codes are or they r simply aware but decided not to comply with it, so a committee can be set up to check these areas too
Lastly, is the welfare package of teachers. Salary and good working environment as well as the reputation of their profession are three major motivating factors for the teachers. Therefore, a nice teaching environment should be provided, salaries should be paid when due and the teaching profession should be respected in the country. A system should be in place to reward hardworking teachers as well as punish or prosecute the ones that are not working hard or intentionally ditching because the growth of the nation depends on its education. It should be known that that regular review of the curriculum should done so as to check the content appropriateness of what is being taught(such as inclusion of vocational skills, entrepreneurship, civic education, technical skills creativity amongst others), Also a review of teachers r enumeration and welfare will help put an end to incessant strikes in our schools.
Ibrahim Ibrahim January 2017