By Victor E. Dike
"We cannot hold a touch to light another path without brightening our own" --Ben Sweetland
One
of the major challenges facing Nigeria today is how to reform its
education sector and train enough high quality manpower to develop the
nation. A lot has been said about revamping the nation's falling
standard of education but the leaders have not taken appropriate actions
to improve the situation. One of the problems caused by the neglect of
education is the overcrowded and chaotic classrooms and Nigeria's
dwindling literacy rate. This article argues that because of the
obstacles to effective teaching and learning many students today lack
the literacy skills to succeed in life after schooling; and this has
affected their productivity and national development.
Basically, literacy is the ability of an individual to read
and write. But its broad definition goes beyond that; literacy involves
reading, writing, speaking and listening. The UNESCO (2004) broadly
defined literacy as "the ability to identify, understand, interpret,
create, communicate, compute and use printed and written materials
associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of
learning to enable an individual to achieve his or her goals, to develop
his or her knowledge and potential, and to participate fully in the
wider society."1
Meanwhile, the National Empowerment
Development Strategy (2005) put Nigeria's literacy rate at 57%,
which declined from the 64.1% literacy rate of 1999 and the 71.9% of
1991. And a survey by the National Bureau of Statistics in 2006 found
that 46.7% of Nigerians are purely illiterate while 53.3% are literate
in the use of the English language. A breakdown of the study, which used
15 years as "adult age," shows that 61.3% of the literate population is
male and 45.3% female. This writer does not want to plunge into the
national political debate of zonal supremacy in education, but it is
pertinent to mention that the study shows that the highest literacy
level is located in the Southeast geo-political zone with adult literacy
figure of 73.5%. The Southwest and South-South geo-political zones
share second position with 70.4%; the North-Central literacy level is
said to be 53.5%; while the Northwest is the lowest with 23.2% of adult
population. According to the survey Nigeria's adult male literacy is
31.0% and female 15.4%.2
As if the above statistics is not troubling enough a United Nations Children's Fund
(UNICEF) study that came out on January 15, 2008 found that over 10
million Nigerian children of school age are not in school and that most
of them are either hawking goods on the streets or doing some form of
menial labor to make ends meet. The study showed that 6.2
million are girls and 3.8 million boys; and about 53 per cent is of
secondary school level and 47 per cent primary school.3It is
worrisome that such huge number of Nigerian youths will enter into the
competitive world without the basic knowledge of the social, political
and economic realities of life.
Why are so many Nigerian
children out of school? Poverty at home, lack of assistance from the
government, and lack of access to formal education are part of the
problem. A wide variety of personal, social, cultural and institutional
factors are, however, working against those who are lucky to be in
school. Because of the unending teacher's industrial actions caused by
the general neglect of education, lack of current books and materials
for teaching and learning, lack of reading intervention programs and
specialists (at the basic level), lack of functional school and public
libraries many of them are facing many problems including poor reading
habits. Consequently, most of the secondary school graduates that are in
various cadres of tertiary institutions are unprepared for the rigors
of higher education.
In most cases the students reading
material is often limited to what the teachers who are toiling under the
most inhumane conditions of service wrote on the board during lectures
or their handouts. But this is not enough to give the students the
literacy skills to participate fully as informed and productive members
of the society. Also, reading is fast vanishing on campuses across the
land because many students are today being distracted by other trivial
issues, including ubiquitous cell phone (or handsets); others are
wasting a lot of time watching television, playing video-games, and
browsing the internet. If good reading habit is not cultivated at the
primary and secondary levels, it becomes much more difficult to develop
it at the tertiary level. Because the structures that create a high
quality education are missing what students are learning in school today
have no value beyond the classroom. The Daily Trust of
November 26, 2008 reported that the government recently acknowledged
that about 80 per cent of Nigerian youths are unemployed and 10 per cent
underemployed. This is mostly because they lack the skills employers
want. A disorganized educational system can only produce half-baked
graduates.
One cannot overemphasize the importance of good
reading and writing skills; it opens the door to knowledge, and improves
a person's literacy skills and quality of life. However, high literacy
skill is critical for a nation's social, political and economic
development. How would Nigeria become an industrialized nation in the
year 2020 when so many of the youths lack the skills to drive the
economy?
Everyone has an opinion about the nation's poor state
of education -politicians, teachers, administrators, businesspeople, and
parents-all voicing their concerns. Despite all the analysis,
viewpoints, and myriad of reforms nothing has changed. The leaders are
good at reciting the problems facing the nation without providing the
tools tackle them. As educators, we know that criticism of Nigeria's
‘poor reading culture' (even by the politicians who are part of the
problem) is not enough. Why has the mountain of education reforms failed
to arrest the dwindling standard of education? How would Nigeria
rekindle its fading reading habit? The society should adopt effective
strategies to tackle the crisis in education. The first step to reverse
Nigeria's dwindling literacy skills would be to adequately fund
schools and provide teachers with the tools for effective teaching and
learning. The holistic strategy should include building school and
public libraries (with current books and journals), and directed by
dedicated professional librarians and competent language arts teachers,
taming corruption that is draining the resources allocated to education,
and employing professional school administrators with proven integrity
and inspired by the commitment to make a difference in the lives of the
students, and providing conducive environment that would motivate people
to read.4 Experts have noted that good libraries could lure some of the ‘students who hate to read' and give them access to great minds.5
To
improve the state of education in Nigeria the government should
change its strategy and begin to offer carrots to teachers and not
sticks only. The teachers are pauperized and today it is a curse to be a
teacher in Nigeria. As we read this article teachers across the land
are on industrial action in their struggle for a better condition of
service. The political leaders of Nigeria seem to forget that
teachers train the future leaders of every society. More often than not
they blame the teachers (for the problems in education) and students for
their failure to learn and excel rather than blame themselves for not
providing them with the tools to improve their reading, writing and
analytical skills. They should learn to ‘walk the talk.' Without
creating a conducive learning environment in schools (and at home) the
‘human seeds' that are being planted in the society would wither and
their growth hampered.6
The schools (from primary to
tertiary institutions) should make reading a top priority by making
materials (books, newspapers, magazines, academic journals, and Internet
sites) available and affordable. And those who need private (or
one-on-one) instruction on reading and writing (at the basic level of
education) should be assisted by professional intervention specialists.
Teachers should demand more from their students and encourage reading
and writing by inserting research projects in their courses; they should
properly blend theory with practice. They should teach the students
"life lessons" they will use the rest of their lives.
The
traditional method of learning (and teaching) by memorizing subject
contents is no longer appropriate as it gives students only what Caine
& Caine (1997) call "surface knowledge" because they do not
understand the contents.7 Thus a person with "scholastic
knowledge" that ‘consists of ideas, principles and procedures–the core
content of any subject or discipline' only, lacks what it takes ‘to
solve real problems or for dealing with complex situations.' Because by
itself "technical or scholastic knowledge" lacks what Gardner (1991)
calls "generative" or "deep" or "genuine"8understanding of
the subject or lacks "felt meaning and a grasp of practical application"
"to apply knowledge to novel situation."9 Traditional
teaching and learning methods and sources of information are no longer
sufficient to give students the information they need at this
information technology era.10 John Dewey was known for
kicking against "the complete domination of instruction by rehearsing
second-hand information, by memorizing for the sake of producing correct
replies at the proper time."11
Nigeria should
change accordingly and provide teachers and schools the necessary tools
to effectively perform the jobs of educating the society. Teachers (and
schools) should not be expected to perform miracles when the lack
teaching and learning tools. Teachers need support through continuing
professional development and motivation to enable them prepare the
youths for success in the competitive global economy. Also, parents have
important role to play in this struggle. They should find out how their
own behavior and thoughts are affecting to attitude of their children
toward education and learning. However, the weak economy (compounded by
the current global economic and financial crisis) has put too much
stress on families who are struggling to make ends meet with little or
nothing left to buy books for their children. Thus improving the economy
should be part of the holistic strategy to tackle the crisis in
education.
Every society is capable of producing high quality
manpower. One wonders why Nigeria could not adequately fund its
schools with its huge oil earnings over the years. Nigeria should
reorganize and redesign its education sector because the society needs
problem solvers and creative minds - people with genuine and practical
knowledge to manage the facing the nation. Nigeria will be facing
more difficult problems if the leaders fail to provide the necessary
infrastructure for good quality education and without a paradigm shift
on how the larger society is managed. Thus without channeling adequate
resources to the education sector and without motivating the teachers to
provide good quality education to the youths and tackle the nation's
dwindling literacy skills, Nigeria will continue to lag behind socially,
politically and economically.
Notes
1.
UNESCO Education Sector, The Plurality of Literacy and its implications
for Policies and Programs: Position Paper. Paris: United National
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2004, p. 13.
2. Punch: "45% of Nigerians are illiterate-Survey," June 20, 2006.
3. Sunday Champion: "7m Nigerian children out of school-UNICEF," May 29, 2005; BusinessDay: "10million Nigerians Children out of school?" February 13, 2008; Nigerian Tribune (editorial): "10million children out of school," January 29, 2008.
4. G.
Ivey and K. Broaddus, "Just plain Reading: A Survey of What makes
students want to read in middle school classrooms." Reading Research
Quarterly, 36, pp.350-377, 2001.
5. J.
Worthy and S. McKool, "Students who say they hate to read: The
Importance of Opportunity, Choice, and Access" (1996), in D.J. Leu, C.K.
Kinzer, K.A. Hinchman (eds.), Literacies for the 21st Century; Research and Practice, 45th Yearbook of the National Reading Conference, pp.245-256, Chicago, USA: National Reading Conference.
6.
Carlos M. Santa "Adolescents Deserve More," in Creating Literacy-Rich
Schools for Adolescents (Gay Ivey & Douglas Fisher), Association for
Supervision and Curriculum Development: Alexandria, Virginia, 2006,
pp.122-141.
7. Renate Nummela Caine and Geofry Caine, Education on the Edge of Possibility; Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria, Virginia, 1997, p.109.
8. Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools should Teach; New York: Basic Book, 1991
9. Renate
Nummela Caine and Geofry Caine, Making Connections: Teaching and the
Human Brain; Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development,
Alexandria, Virginia, 1991; Renate Nummela Caine and Geofry Caine, Education on the Edge of Possibility; Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria, Virginia, 1997, pp.108-115.
10. Renate Nummela Caine and Geofry Caine, Education on the Edge of Possibility; Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria, Virginia, 1997, pp.45-52.
11. John Dewey: How We Think; Boston: D.C. Heath, 1910; John Dewey: Democracy and Education; New York: The Free Press, 1906.
Victor E. Dike is the author of Leadership without a Moral Purpose:A Critical Analysis of Nigeria and the Obasanjo Administration, 2003-2007 (forthcoming)
