It is not news in Nigeria that education has become something that government doesn’t seem to have interest in anymore. Government’s attitude towards education can be inferred from the way policies are arbitrarily formulated and disregarded both at the policy-making level to the management level down to the administration level.
There seem to be no long-term plan towards education – not as if Nigeria has planned for anything before save for the wellbeing of the political class.
Nations that understand the importance of education as an indispensable necessity in national growth and development, plan for decades on the type of education that they want to bequeath to its citizens.
These also involve the inoculation of national values in the minds of the citizens.
However, our case has been proven to be different, not in the things that we are yet to do but in the ones that we have done and have failed to do.
That is why the system has crumbled and instead of dismantling it so as to rebuild it from the scratch, we are picking the rubbles and patching it in a way that is no longer desirable.
In Port Harcourt, every one-room apartment is turned into some sort of international school. The only thing international about these mushrooms is that government in its own wisdom has refused to shut them down.
Perhaps, the government is comfortable at the rampant miseducation of its citizens. But how does a government sit down and allow something of such magnitude to happen?
How are these children enrolled in these school taught? What is the qualification of their teaching force? Are these facilities standard enough to bear the name school? Have we bothered accessing?
Some parents enroll their children in these schools on the premise that they do exceptionally well in their senior secondary certificate examination but we know that these claims are not entirely true as these schools employ the services of mercenaries who help these students during crucial examinations to produce those exceptional results.
But one has to rely on the government which has forced public education to rot away to, again, salvage the situation. These schools are mainly taking advantage of the gap created by the government and are in effect, abusing it.
The Rivers State Commissioner for education, during a press conference, said that all the private schools would have to renew their licenses to stop schools from forging the old licenses.
This approach only scratches the surface of the rot. There should be a comprehensive assessment of these schools. How do they give students all-around educational experiences as enshrined in the curriculum when their facilities are so small that it can barely contain a car park?
What happened to sports facilities, farms for agriculture and space for children to play and be free?
The government should wake up and save these children from being damaged forever by these schools.
