Educational reform now demands that 6-3-3-4 be reconfigured, updated and fully implemented. If supported by comprehensive reform of our governance and of other sectors, it will provide a sturdy foundation for our future greatness.
Implementation is the doing. We must return to first principles:
modify the structure, get the teachers, the working space, the equipment. Expensive. Not an overnight affair. Starting with little or nothing after 33 wasted years, it’s a tall order. But we must get on the task, and stick with it until it’s done. It’s the only way.
First, the structure. On reconsideration, not one but two nursery/pre-primary years must be added as compulsory and free; otherwise the poorer children will not get it, and they will arrive at the first year of primary school far behind and thoroughly outclassed by the wealthier children who had two or more years of pre-primary. The structure should therefore be expanded to 2-6-3-3-4.
Next, the industrial education and technical skills acquisition built into the senior secondary school must be given the closest attention and fullest funding. Modernization of our entire educational system requires that we abandon the old colonial educational philosophy whose aim was to produce clerks and genteel liberal arts and science graduates to assist the British in administering their empire and exploiting its natural resources, while the entire populace serve as wholesale consumers of British manufactured goods.
Instead, we must embrace a philosophy of doing for self: exploiting our resources for our own benefit; processing our own raw materials; manufacturing many or most of the goods we need in our daily living. In other words, we need a modern education whose products will enable Nigeria to do for itself what the industrialized nations of the world do for themselves.
Technical/vocational education is the gateway to industrialization. It must therefore become the centerpiece of Nigerian education at both secondary and tertiary levels. The old academic “grammar school” curricula, also updated and Afro-centered, will operate in much more limited space at both secondary and tertiary levels.
Looking back in our history, we find that none of this is actually new. The Hope Waddell Training Institution, founded in 1895 by Scottish Presbyterian missionaries in Calabar, spent its first 55 years as an industrial school-cum-technical/vocational skills acquisition center around which was clustered a primary school, a teacher training college and a secondary grammar school, all of whose students fed from it and learned from it. But when British colonial policy downgraded industrial education (which was bound to offer future competition to British manufactures) and exalted grammar school education (to produce clerks), Hope Waddell reluctantly changed and conformed. It transferred the primary school to Duke Town and the teachers college to Afikpo, reduced the technical/vocational to a skeleton, and allowed the grammar school to balloon out and occupy the entire pedagogical space.
The struggle to establish technical/vocational education (and through it to industrialize) is in one sense a struggle to reverse and recover the Hope Waddell story. But it’s been a failed attempt so far. The late 1950s saw the establishment of four post-secondary institutions focused on science and technology: the Federal Emergency Science School in Lagos, and the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in the regional centers of Ibadan, Zaria and Enugu. These schools were phased into the upcoming new universities in their respective regions in the early 1960s, and their concerns with technical skills acquisition and the development of “middle level manpower” were swept aside and forgotten for over a decade until resurrected with the founding of the polytechnics and colleges of technology in the late 1970s.
As part of this renewed effort, in 1979 the Nigerian government shipped out to the United States a contingent of young people in a post-secondary “crash program” for technical skills acquisition. But the program was ill-conceived and haphazard. It was to last two years, ending in what the Americans called an “associate degree” (roughly equivalent to our polytechnic OND). But as the two years drew to a close, government sent out a team to interview the students and select 50 to continue to a bachelors degree in education so they could come home and teach the technical skills they had acquired.
The hundreds who “failed” the interview were to be herded onto a plane and flown back home. However, many of them went underground to struggle and continue their education in America illegally until they got a proper 4-year bachelors degree in their disciplines.
Those who got on the plane came home to a dead end. No jobs awaited them in the technologies and industries in which they had so imperfectly trained. Nigerian employers, such as they were, would not take them with their 2-year “associate degree” any more than they took 2-year OND diplomates. And those, legal or illegal, who stayed on in America—how did they fare when they got home? Where did they practice the technical (and teaching) skills they had acquired? How did they contribute to Nigeria’s industrialization which still has not begun?
• To be continued
Onwuchekwa Jemie
