"You can hardly find a person under thirty in today’s Nigeria who has not spent a year or more in school. The truth is that even the majority of those who are referred to as illiterate had their time in school. To go to school has become a mandatory life chore. Those who for one reason or another do not make it to the university already feel cheated. Allotted with such deference, one would think school answers this question; that it tells every individual who enrols why they were created. Or even if it does not attempt this question directly, that it has in its possession a conscious design—by those who dictate what students should and should not learn—to lead students to discovering their purpose in life. The learner does not know how different he is from the man he calls teacher, how different he is from his classmate, how different he is from the genius of whom his teachers say discovered one thing or another, or propounded one theory or the other.I do not mean to promote a scholastic error here, but schools should not be factory houses where men are soldered. They are rather institutions where ideas and thoughts are reared, fashioned, and sharpened, serving as tools for the use of students to discover and indeed improve on who they are.
