The Nigerian educational system as we have it today is
very poor and below standards. This is evidenced in the quality of graduates we
see today, the poor managerial skills, poor technical skills and even poor
governance. The teachers are not to blame. But the system since “garbage in and
garbage out” formula must follow most man-made processes.
The Process is very faulty as you will see in the image
below.
The first problem with the system is that rather can
producing confident graduates who possess the right mental attitude and esteem
to face the future and industry life, it produces half-baked, disillusioned
graduates who lack direction as to what they want out of life. Most of those
who even attempt an industry interview make nonsense of the universities that
produced them before their interviewers or prospective employers. Nobody taught
them in school about the real competitive life out there in the industry. It
was not their fault, but the system that they underwent. Why make a Nigerian
student stress over ‘Calculus’ when you know that he will never use it nor can
relate with it in real life. This in itself is a wasted effort.
The second problem I have observed over the years about
the Nigerian Educational system is the fact that there is a clear disconnect
between the Academia and the Industry. This in itself is a great disservice to
the nation Nigeria in a whole. The educational system was poorly designed to
feed the industry. Two gaps can be identified here. First one, the Academia
structured its curriculum in such a way that it is out-of-scope with the
requirements from the Industry sector.
Second problem which is more worrisome is that while the
Industries are scaling (growing) in a linear fashion, the graduates that are
churned out by academia are growing exponentially.
Thirdly, there is the intrinsic problem or what I
consider as menace within the Academia. This is what I call the silly attitude
of lecturers and teacher priding themselves in the number of failures produced
per course, rather than in successes recorded. This is should be looked into.
Every Nigerian lecturer should be provided the incentive to upgrade his/her
knowledge with industry practice and global best practice if our educational
system should survive into the next generation. There should be KPA(Key
performance areas) and indicators(KPIs) with heavy weightings that should
discourage this attitude or culture. A lecturer’s promotion must not only be
tied to his/her qualifications, but it must be tied to the number of successful
candidates produced per course and the Ivory towers must request 360-degrees
feedback on lecturers’ course delivery from both his/her customers (in this
case the students or pupils) and from fellow lecturers and this should form
part of lecturer’s assessments. This should be done leveraging IT platforms
such that manipulations will be minimized. We cannot afford to toy with Nigeria’s
future.
THE WAY OUT!
- The Authorities vested with powers of producing the educational blueprint must be made to research into Industry and tailor the curriculum or syllabus to match Industry requirements.
- . Educational capacity building does not mean the same thing as building more Universities but it means building more Competent Educational Service Providers.
- . It is time to look ‘outside’ Academia for better edu-CARE facilitators in the form of PPPs – Public-Private Partnership frameworks.
- Lecturers must be re-modelled to prove themselves through the use of ‘external’ consultants and 360-degree feedback systems and effective KPAs/KPIs aligned towards success rather than failures produced.
- . There MUST be more controls coming from our Educational Regulatory bodies. Institutes and institutions should be made to go through thorough accreditations and re-accreditations in a Plan-Do-Check-Redo cycle. ISO 9001:2008 - Quality management systems – based assessments.
- . Finally, at the Primary &Secondary educational levels, we must begin to harness the power of creativity and talent hunting so that we can align the students and pupils towards more intuitive learning like the Montessori-style of education so they can relate learning to real-life best practice. Who said you cannot expose a Secondary school student to practical Industry experience? That is when he conceives his/her dreams and can decide to be an Entrepreneur and help in the capacity and capability building that would help accelerate the Industry and ultimately absorb the employee-minded graduates. This will reduce the number of surplus that are absorbed into crime and vices. Knowledge should be practice-based and not theory or abstract-based.