What makes for good education?
The true story of education in Nigeria.
A few months back I read an article on a local newspaper which talks about the lack of teachers in some Nigerian schools. While reading, a story stuck with me about a situation which happened in a mushroom private school in Abuja, where a teacher wanted to update the children’s knowledge of current affairs at the assembly ground after the the children had recited the national anthem, said their morning prayers and sang songs. At the top of her voice she shouted, “The Vice President of Nigeria is Nnamdi Sambo(the vice president of Nigeria is Namadi Sambo), repeat it!” A kind neighbour listening to the assembly in session came out of his house to correct the teacher’s mistake but the mistake had been done. Even when she said Namadi, the children replied with Nnamdi.
Its a sad thing that these are the kind of teachers filling classrooms across the country today. Blaming the poor performance of students in SSCE(Senior School Certificate Examinations) and especially the UME(Unified Matriculation Examination) where the education board recorded mass failure this year is in a way attributable to the quality of teachers in the school system today, would be over laboring the issue. But this attitude for failure doesn't start from the secondary school but the primary education.
Its been almost five years since I left secondary school and during my time there, I had been subjected to almost the same educational experience. You would think you are getting the best educational experience, better than your peers but it took my first year in the university to devalue almost everything I learnt that didn’t come from the textbook.
This teachers failed the same tests they set for their students. It happened in Kano, Kaduna, Kwara and Ekiti. In Bauchi and Sokoto states, 4,000 primary three students were assessed in Hausa which is the lingua franca for the vast majority of the students. Just 29% of the students in Bauchi and 18% in Sokoto could read sentences. In a comprehension test, less than one-fifth of them achieved a score of 80% accounting for only six per cent of all students in Bauchi and 3% in Sokoto.
These results are shocking and have turned the spotlight on how teachers are trained and the support they receive once they are in the classroom.
Besides the problem of unqualified teachers, there is another bigger issue of shortage of teachers. The internationally agreed standard of teacher to pupil ratio is 1:40 but Nigeria has 1:134 or 1:78 depending on the state. In Nigeria figures from the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) show that 39,239 qualified teachers will need to be engaged annually for basic education up to 2020 and 80,364 for adult and non-formal education.
According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), at least 1.7million new teaching positions must be created to accommodate the growing demand for primary education. Countries would also have to recruit another 5.1million teachers to make up for attrition as teachers currently in the workforce retire or leave the profession.
But the question remains. What makes for good education? Is it the building or its teachers?
