Must Read: Checklist for tackling the rot in education

The call for review of the education sector is long overdue. Politicians are not giving schools administration room and reason to function normally; teachers are ill-equipped and mostly ill-motivated and the students just pass time within the school system without having a clear focus of the much desired need to broaden their mind by the experience of education. Where are our values?
The just concluded UTME for 2012 again revealed that the quality of students passing through schools in Nigeria is not presentable in any education system other than in Nigeria. As many as 27,000+ candidates had their results
withheld for various reasons; and failure was on a mass scale with only three candidates scoring beyond 300 marks and others barely scaling the 200 minimum score. The results are the evidence of decay in the system.
The Federal Ministry of Education claims to be working ceaselessly to unearth the various problems of the Nigerian education system; and only recently created a committee to look into the education sector to see how progress can be made especially among the universities.
Nigerian universities have been besieged with too many problems and some of them have been identified to include the following:

• Inadequate funding from the government.
• Erosion of values by a valueless political system resulting in a breach of protocol, the weakened internal policies in the area of union presence and activities, as well compromised administrative procedures.
• Government’s poor planning and implementation culture as major impediments to the achievement of university missions i.e. teaching and learning, research and consultancies.
• Planning and implementation issues.
• Party politics –many lectures and professors shuttle between government positions and the university employment; bringing party politicking skills into the administration of the universities which students, parents and their sponsors at the receiving end of the detrimental effects that follow.
• Business interest of lecturers in that they are more focused on making money outside the classroom than writing papers or carrying out research in their field of study.

School fees, levies and other costs are never reviewed downwards; this makes one wonder why it is so difficult to equip schools enough to ensure a safe and habitable environment to promote academic excellence.
Until the above mentioned areas are tackled, a complete review of the system will not be achieved. The time to start is now.

-Dailytimes

Share your thoughts....thanks!