Despite the growing emphasis on academic achievement in Nigerian schools, an essential dimension of education remains largely overlooked: teaching young learners the skills needed to navigate and rise within a complex social and economic landscape.
As inequality deepens and access to opportunity becomes more uneven, there’s a pressing need to reassess what and how children are taught, not just in terms of literacy and numeracy, but in equipping them with the social awareness, communication abilities, confidence, and strategic thinking necessary for upward mobility.
Stakeholders argue that a shift in Nigeria’s Early Childhood Education (ECE) curriculum could be the key to breaking the generational cycles of poverty and unlocking a more inclusive future.
Early Childhood Education is crucial to shaping youngsters’ brain development, emotional regulation, and language skills, which in turn not only enables them to enjoy their childhood stages of life but also shapes their personalities towards socially acceptable adults.
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According to a research by Katarzyna Bobrowicz and colleagues from the University of Luxembourg and the University of Liège in Belgium, many early childhood education policies are betting on individual merits as published in PLOS.
A 53-country survey of global ECE policies indicates favouritism of competition over cooperation, individualism over solidarity and talent over luck.
Most of the countries surveyed embrace economic meritocracy in their ECE policies, promoting individual skill and agency over solidarity and community reliance.
In Nigeria, the ECE curriculum, as outlined in the National Policy on Education (NPE), aims to provide foundational learning for children aged zero to eight, encompassing care, development, and education.
The curriculum focuses on holistic development, including cognitive, social, emotional, and physical aspects, through play-based learning and other appropriate methods.
However, experts believe the problem with education in Nigeria is systemic.
Elizabeth Ohaka, an early childhood educationist and school owner ,frowned at Nigeria’s education system, which she said, is purely based on individual effort, which does not give room for collaboration.
“The collaboration aspect is very minimal, even the way teachers are taught, they are taught based on the same criteria, their merits.
“The truth is, it is part of the whole system that people will be judged based on their efforts. The question is, why can’t two or three people work as a team and then write the examination?” she queried.
However, Ohaka reiterated that one of the key 21st-century skills is collaboration, because people achieve more when they work as a team.
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She emphasised that the best form of learning is when people collaborate, because in real life, people come together to form companies, and they do very well.
“We need to inculcate collaboration in the classrooms; for instance, in our school, we do a lot of teamwork during classroom activities.
“We hope that shortly, Nigeria can work towards getting more collaboration in the classrooms, among teachers, parents, and all the stakeholders; it’s something that we have to work towards, especially in early childhood education, where the children are being impacted,” she said.
Jessica Osuere, chief executive officer at RubbiesHub Educational Services, emphasised that ECE in Nigeria is often prioritised by individual merit and competition, where learners are rewarded for being top in the class rather than for growing together.
She said though this may encourage academic excellence, but it can hinder the holistic development of the child by fostering unhealthy rivalry, stifling creativity, and ignoring vital social and emotional skills.
“A child may not be academically sound but very exceptional in other ways. Societal issues today might have their roots in this type of ‘competitive’ foundational education, where children begin to associate learning with outperforming others, instead of engaging collaboratively, which leads to fear of failure, low self-esteem among slower learners, and fuels a lack of empathy and teamwork.
If we truly want to mould the total child who is intellectually, emotionally, socially, and morally fit, then we must shift from performance-based models of early childhood education to a development-focused model,” she said.
Osuere disclosed that this can be achieved by reforming the country’s ECE curriculum to promote cooperative learning, play-based and inquiry-driven methods.
Besides, she said there is a need to reform teacher training, assessment methods and parental mindset to focus not just on academic scores but on nurturing well-rounded and confident individuals who are both useful to themselves and their communities.
She reiterated that the focus on performance-based learning rather than development is inimical to Nigeria’s education system.
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“That’s how we breed first-class students who can’t carry out simple tasks and are morally bankrupt because we major in minors and minor in majors,” Osuere noted.
One of the challenges facing the country is that the national policies for ECE have been in existence since the year 2007, without evaluation; hence, the implementation as well as the extent of achievement of the goals is overdue.
After over a decade of existence, studies have shown that most of the ECE centres across the country, especially the public ones, are in a deplorable state in their education programmes.
Experts believe the inability of the federal government to produce the necessary documents for the successful implementation of the policies and the curricula, and to promulgate them at all public centres in the country led to a lack of availability and awareness of the policies among teachers who are supposed to implement them.
