During the recent presentation of the 2016 budget proposals to members of the National Assembly, President Muhammadu Buhari informed the nation of his government’s intention to recruit 500,000 unemployed graduates and deploy them to primary schools across the country as teachers. Since this idea was first mooted by the Minister of Labour and Productivity, Dr. Chris Ngige, I have been concerned on thinking behind the soon-to-be-implemented policy and if much thought has been given to the unintended impact it may have on the students and Nigeria’s struggling education sector.
A teacher is a professional who helps students learn concepts or skills in a particular area of study. He or she is expected to well-versed and knowledgeable in the subject of interest, so as to be able to pass on this knowledge successfully to the learners in his/her care. The current model of teacher training in Nigeria requires an aspiring teacher to at least go through a three-year study programme in an accredited College of Education, and upon graduation is conferred with the National Certificate of Education qualification. This qualifies such an individual to take up any teaching position in a primary school in the country. A higher qualification like a university degree may be required for a role in a secondary school.
Resulting from the high population of young persons in the school age range of 0 – 18, there has been an explosion in the number of schools across the country, thus stepping up the demand for teachers to fill up available vacancies in these schools. Unfortunately, the number of graduates being turned out from the various teacher training institutions has thus far been grossly inadequate, such that even some graduates of education opt for jobs in organisations that can pay high salaries. This creates a dearth of qualified personnel who can successfully take up a teaching role in schools. Consequently, most education administrators opt for graduates from non-education-related disciplines, such as engineering, sciences and the arts. Many of these persons have no passion for the profession or the students they teach but only accepted the offer owing to the paucity of jobs in the more lucrative sectors of the economy. A lot of them see teaching as a transient employment opportunity, where they can bid their time till a more attractive job offer comes up in an organisation that can pay them salaries that match their expectations.
It is little wonder that Nigeria’s education sector has for many years being in a deplorable state, characterised by incessant strikes, widespread examination malpractice, poor infrastructure, poorly motivated personnel, cultism, and a high dropout rate. It is commonplace nowadays to see a Nigerian secondary graduate struggle to express himself/herself in English without making serious grammatical blunders. Even worse is written communication, as one can hardly make sense of an essay or letter composed by these persons, as it is fraught with grammatical and spelling errors. You will even be more astonished to discover the person in question earned a distinction grade in English Language. It has become obvious that the current model of teacher training, and deployment has been to a large extent unsuccessful, and if steps are not taken to address the problems in this area, we risk being dragged further down educationally. This is in spite of the fact that we currently have one of the highest number of student populations of school age children in the world. These students run the risk of being poorly educated and will find it hard to compete with their counterparts from other parts of the world.
McKinsey and Company, a United States based management consulting firm, in 2007, conducted a study on some of the world’s top performing school systems, and a major part of its finding is that the quality of the education system usually is not better than the quality of the teachers in the systems. This stresses the need for highly competent persons to be recruited into the teaching profession. Also worthy of note is the procedure these top performing school systems undergo to recruit candidates into available teaching roles in their schools. Such a person graduates in the top 10 per cent of her class. In the Nigerian context, this will be similar to graduating with either a First Class or Second Class Upper Division degree. This ensures that the selection pool is very rich and made up of the brightest candidates available anywhere in the country. Shortlisted graduates are then made to undergo a series of rigorous tests and checks, which also includes a personality test to assess if they possess the required skill set to succeed in a teaching career.
Little wonder that the internationally acclaimed model school systems of Singapore, Finland, South Korea, and Hong Kong consistently produce some the smartest and academically sound graduates, who consistently produce performances that rank in the top echelons of international comparative benchmark tests like the Programme for International Students Assessment, and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. The Singaporean economic success story of leapfrogging from a Third to First World economy in one generation, would perhaps not have been possible without the input of the graduates from their high quality education system.
The recently announced plan job creation plan by Buhari is a laudable and commendable effort, and must be supported by every right thinking Nigerian. But I fear that the plan to send all these persons to schools is one that will sink our already struggling education system further. In the short term, this action holds benefits for government and the beneficiaries.But the question is, why try to solve a problem while creating an even bigger one that comes round to haunt the nation in the future? We all know how the nation is today paying the price of the neglect the education sector suffered during the era of military rule. Many of the persons causing problems for our country today are all products of that system. Perhaps, our nation would have been well off today if we got it right some 20 – 30 years ago.
PUNCH
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