Childhood education lays the foundation for all future personal and societal achievements. This is probably why Children’s Day celebration represents a unique occasion to focus on the state of child education.
Today’s children live rapidly changing world where they are bombarded with more information than their parents got at the same age decades ago. This is due to the penetration of Information Communication Technologies (ICT).
Abiola Awosika, professor of Education Technology and General Manager at EduTech, opined that video games, television set, the internet is changing the way children interact, learn and work. To deal with this revolution, new forms of literacy are needed.
According to Awosika by the time a child is 21 years of age, they would have spent 10, 000 hours on video games, 20, 000 hours reading emails, 20, 000 hours sitting before a television set and 10, 000 hours responding to cell phone calls.
“In the midst of this revolution, the focus should be on helping children develop new forms of literacy, to enable them grow into functional, productive and happy members of the global society”.
Awosika said it would be erroneous to suppose that the 21st century children no longer read, because they do not read books like their parents did. She likened it to the advent of mass print. Before mass printing technology became popular, people wrote on tablets of stone and the more affluent used the papyrus. However, with the advent of mass print, stone tablets and papyrus sheets became obsolete; and people read books.
Today’s children live at a time when we are experiencing a similar revolution, the move from print to e-books.
Concerned parents are looking for and formulating new learning strategies to help their children, who are constantly bombarded with information and data from their environment.
Ebele Obiadazie, a building engineer and mother of three says her children find it difficult to sit still and learn. However, she found out that when she hands them a tablet (handheld device), it keeps them engaged. “I decided to subscribe to some online education packages for them with one of the telecommunication companies and the story has since changed. They can sit for long hours doing their homework online” she happily said.
Igho Pearl, lecturer at the University of Liberia, Monrovia, says children have been grossly neglected in Nigeria. She alluded to a recent United Nations Children’s Education Fund (UNICEF) which estimates that no fewer than 10.5 million Nigerian children are out of school.
According to UNICEF, over the last decade, Nigeria’s exponential population growth has put enormous pressure on the country’s resources and on already overstretched public services and infrastructure. With children under 15 years of age accounting for about 45 per cent of the country’s population, the burden on education and other sectors has become overwhelming.
The number of schools, facilities and teachers available for basic education remain inadequate for the eligible number of children and youths. This is more so in urban areas where there is population pressure. Under these conditions, teaching and learning cannot be effective; hence the outcomes are usually below expectation.
Another challenge in Nigeria is the issue of girls’ education. In the North particularly, the gender gap remains particularly wide and the proportion of girls to boys in school ranges from 1 girl to 2 boys to 1 to 3 in some States.
STEPHEN ONYEKWELU
