The lofty ideas behind harnessing the prospect of technical education in Nigeria is a vision government and its agencies must look inward and direct the course of socio-economic growth and development toward technology and vocation, starting from institutions of learning industry experts insists.
Technical and vocational education programme was established by the government to cater to the technical aspects of educational of people. The programme, according to the policy statement on education, has the objectives to raise the technical potential of thousands of youths who could not gain admission into the Universities and to further strengthen the production of technician requires by the country in key sectors of the economies.
Experts declared that the educational curriculum should be tailored in such a way that would accommodate emerging trends in sciences, technology and entrepreneurship using public-private sector model, just as they wanted good collaboration between tertiary institutions and industries, using practical-based techniques to train would-be graduates of tertiary institutions in the country.
For Olusola Oyewole, an educationist, tertiary institution had not done enough in the area of collaboration with industries in terms of sciences and technology for socio-economic development.
He recommended regular interaction between tertiary institutions, especially universities and industries to make desired socio-economic difference in the country, saying as of now “there is no good collaboration between universities and industries”, but hoped that there scenario would soon change with the way the academics’ and stakeholders’ reasoning going.
Sola Adetutu, Rector, Ogun State Institute of Technology, (OGITECH), Igbesa in Agbara said that the country could only develop if there were an appreciable change in what institutions teach and research about as this remains main changer and developer of Nigerian economy, adding that failure to do that would amount to socio-economic suicidal move.
Adetutu required institutions to focus more on where they have comparative teaching and research potentials and internalise technical and vocational education in their educational curricula in order to ensure that government’s goals of socio-economic transformation is met, saying that any education that does not teach creativity and lacks practicals is useless.
Adeyinka Adeoti, an education consultant suggested that there is a need for government to spend money on research programmes, while funding should drive the advancement of all the technical and vocational centers
“Knowing that technical and vocational education programme was originally designed for millions in Nigeria, the government, through the new minister for education, as a matter of urgency, should reshape its educational agencies so that they can pay more attention to the prospects that technical education has in stock for the growth of the country”
He pointed out that when one considers the overwhelming influence of education on the growth of most nations across the globe, it becomes understandable why learning gets as much attention as it does. After all, it is the primary means through which socio-economic upgrades come about.
KELECHI EWUZIE
