The wife of the former Governor of Oyo State, Mrs. Bukola Ladoja has called on the Federal Government to ensure a review of the current basic education curriculum to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship in the country.
She made the call during the weekend In Abuja at a workshop and induction of over 100 private school proprietors and teachers in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) into her new reading campaign project tagged, “One Child, One Book, One Week”.
Bukola Ladoja who is an Ambassador of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), lamented the poor reading and writing culture in the Nigerian child and has developed a strategy to address the problem, saying this has a detrimental effect on the development of the nation.
Mrs. Ladoja who is also the President and founder of the Reading Awareness Society for Development in Africa (RASDA), noted that the current basic education curriculum was designed for the cognitive and brain development of a child without necessarily developing the mind that would allow children to be creative and innovative.
She noted that this was a major challenge in Nigeria, where graduates of institutions in the country become job-seekers instead of job creators or employers of labor.
She also called on the Federal Government to support private schools in the country, arguing that private schools are the ones that have come to rescue Nigeria by creating access to basic and territory education in the country.
Mrs Bukola Ladoja, further explained that the One-Child-One-Book-One-Week, project is designed to ignite the reading fire among primary and secondary school students, both public and private in Nigeria.
Also, speaking, the Chairperson of the National Association of Proprietors of Private Schools (NAPPS), Ruth Agboola,
said the British curriculum that Nigeria adopted has always been on the cognitive side, learning how to read and write and how to do mathematics.
She said: “We have realized that the world of today is changing, the child has to be innovative and be able to construct. So, we have to go back to the entrepreneurship and vocational days when children learn a trade. This is why we have a lot of problems in this country, we are not producers, we are consumers.”
Agboola said there was a need to change this orientation to be able to raise children that would take up the development of the country.
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Ex-Oyo governor’s wife calls for review of basic education curriculum
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