Believe me, I'm not exaggerating when I say that my country (Nigeria's) educational system is very far from flawless. In fact, I'd say it's depleting to some extent, seeing as it's been dealing with several challenges ranging from high dropout rates to lack of funding and outdated teaching methods. These issues and many more create the familiar cycle of poverty, inequality and mediocrity which prolongs and worsens my country's economic struggles.
Can it be remedied? 🤔 Of course, if we can reprioritize the sector and take proper measures.
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First, to address the aforementioned challenges, changes must be made at every level. We need to invest in teacher training, improve infrastructures and provide more resources for students. But most importantly, we need to shift our focus from rote learning to critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
If I was given the opportunity to remove something from Nigeria's educational system and replace it with another, I'd revamp the whole academic curriculum to forego some irrelevant courses and accommodate some courses that will be applicable and relevant in our present day.
You see, most courses in our Nigerian curriculum now are still dependent on the 1980's and there's no way those would still be relevant in our today's world. For instance, during highschool, I and my peers were taught typewriting and shorthand as a subject. Even though we were pretty much advanced in the era of technology.
Back then, it didn't seem as absurd as I think of it now. Even as a college student, sometimes I hear about a course and ask myself; “Of what use is this in Nigeria today?”
I mean, considering the over-saturated nature of the Nigerian labour market, it's only appropriate to embrace courses that would put our graduates on a higher pedestal.
Sometime ago, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine and he ranted to me about his school and how “unserious” it was. Despite being in the final year of his undergraduate program “computer science”, he and his coursemates had never once been taught coding, programming and the rest of that.
Amusingly, the lecturers said they should go and learn tech skills on their own 😅. If you ask me, I'd say that's just an excuse to cover up their ignorance on the field. And for the records, this is a notable private university we're talking about here. It's quite appalling that despite such huge amount of money paid for tuition, the students can't boast of an adequate and functional computer lab, not to talk of a library. There's no form of practical learning whatsoever 🤦.
And this is probably the most common challenge facing students in other departments. Nowadays, education is more of a business strategy for these institutions that they've completely deviated from qualitative teaching to mediocrity.
I believe that by supplementing our curriculum with courses that'd actually help to build life survival skills, personal growth, reading skills, writing skills, public speaking, tech skills, knowledge on protecting our ecosystem and many more using a practical approach, we can make a bigger impact in our lives and the future of our generations to come.
In addition to that, I'd also remove the 'memorization to forget' nature of our educational system and place more emphasis on a practical system if possible. I think students are so consumed with the concept of “failure” and “carryovers” that most of us tend to avoid it through cramming. Some of our lecturers even encourage this approach that rather than explain a course in class, they'd just distribute materials, leave and expect you to memorize the content in a short time and pass their exams.
This is why a lot of graduates can't even defend their degrees after college. Some of us were not taught to understand and digest the courses but to rather pass a one time exam.
And after that? Poof! All that knowledge evaporates into thin air.
I've come to the realization that our educational system puts too much pressure on "student failure" than on "student learning". So, if we eliminate this method of continuous assessment and replace it with individual assessment, it would help ensure that all students are growing and learning effectively. Moreso, it would help reduce the mental stress and unhealthy rivalry associated with our general testing method.
Honestly, there's a lot more I wish to highlight on this topic but I'll stop here so as not to bore you, my dear readers. These are just some of my deep thoughts as a Nigerian student and I hope that someday, our leaders would urgently take these points into due consideration and better our educational sector before it completely goes down the drain 🙂.
P.S. All photos are mine