The 1979 “crash program” in post-secondary technical education was a flop. It would have made better sense to train all of the students for four years in their various technical specialties, allowing perhaps one semester/half a year’s worth of teacher training courses. The imparting of technical skills, whether at secondary or tertiary level, is much less a matter of conventional “teaching methods” and “psychology of learning” than of hands-on manual work and mathematics. Two years of “teaching methods” is excessive; and singling out 50 students for whatever additional training out of a “crash program” of several hundred students rather nullifies the urgency and expected gains of the “crash.”
In short, this crash program was a botched opportunity to begin the mass production of skilled teachers in the technical disciplines. Now, 36 years later, we must start afresh: gather and “train the trainers” (skilled teachers) in their large numbers, and do it quickly.
And who are the “trainers” that must be trained (readied for action)? They are the present day practitioners, the experts, the men and women who earn their living in trades, crafts and occupations such as: electrical wiring, plumbing, building & bricklaying, road construction, carpentry & cabinet making, upholstery, welding, automobile mechanics, baking, blacksmithing, goldsmithing & jewelry making, locksmithing, iron bending, metalworking, butchering, cooking, tailoring, decorating, painting, drafting, engraving, gardening & landscaping, glassmaking, pottery, glazing, machining, piano tuning & repairing, stonemasonry, tiling, roofing, shipbuilding, shoemaking, graphics & sign writing, toolmaking, clockmaking, spinning, quilting, rug making—in short, the entire range of metal crafts, stonecrafts, ceramics & glass crafts, fiber & textile crafts, flower crafts, needlework, leatherworks, wood & furniture crafts, the computer information & telecommunications technologies, engine construction & maintenance technologies, all the big and the small that keep the industrial state running.
The general complaint is that these experts are insufficient in quantity as well as quality in Nigeria; and employers are compelled to rely heavily on migrant technical workers from our ECOWAS neighbours.
Be that as it may, it is more convenient (and cheaper) to train the trainers here at home than abroad. Bring teachers in shiploads from abroad if needed. Then let the trained trainers flood the technical schools and programs. All that the schools need will be classroom and workshop space, equipment, and boys and girls eager to learn!
By making space for technical/vocational education, 6-3-3-4 did for secondary education what the inauguration of polytechnics in the previous decade did for tertiary education. But the “space” was too small and off-center. The dream of “industrial take-off” did not materialize because it was merely a “dream,” not driven by “right action” to make it happen.
Industrial education and technical/vocational skills acquisition needed to be the centerpiece of Nigerian education at all levels. It needed to displace and replace British colonial academic grammar school education and occupy the huge central space it had hitherto occupied. It needed to be accorded the highest national priority alongside security and jobs, and it needed to be funded accordingly. Technical skills teachers needed to be trained in their hundreds of thousands, and well paid. Classrooms and workshops needed to be built and well equipped. And the students needed to be counseled and guided away from academic grammar school subjects into industrial and technical specialties. A level playing field needed to be established, with equitable regulations carefully spelled out; and using all the inducements that governments normally have at their command, entrepreneurs needed to be encouraged to establish productive industries of all sorts that would provide the young people a place to put their learning to work and earn a decent living.
None of these “right actions” were taken. On the contrary, the technical education segment of 6-3-3-4 was dead on arrival. And the accompanying tertiary institutions—the polytechnics and colleges of technology—were by official government policy relegated to second class, a position inferior to universities of the conventional, traditional academic grammar school type. And again there were no agricultural or manufacturing industries in which the technical education acquired in polytechnics could be put to use.
It was a fatal error to rank polytechnics (and, for that matter, colleges of education) as inferior to universities. Nigeria shot itself in the foot when it inaugurated polytechnics with the goal of producing the technical and managerial manpower that would spearhead the much dreamed of “industrial take-off,” but then, adopting the antiquated hierarchical tradition of British higher education, named the polytechnics as inferior to universities. This was, as it were, the final blow, the last straw that made “industrial take-off” impossible. Four decades later, this mistake has not been corrected.
This egregious error is a critical contributory factor to the confusion and disarray in our higher education. The mismanagement of our higher education, and the dire consequences—the decay of infrastructure, the perpetual strikes, the collapse of morals, morale and ésprit, the collapse of teaching and learning standards—all must be laid at the door of those who have governed Nigeria and managed our national affairs since independence.
In furtherance of this discourse I shall reprint, in the weeks that follow, three of my mid-1980s Guardian newspaper essays analyzing these issues and pointing a way forward for our higher education (“Discrimination against polytechnics”; “Restructuring higher education”; “The content of higher education”). The issues, unfortunately, have remained basically the same.
• To be continued
ONWUCHEKWA JEMIE
