Re-educating the Nigerian child

January 24 marked the annual International Day of Education; a moment to reaffirm global commitment to the rights of every child to  quality education. While emphasis is placed on the child in Nigeria, it is not just the child or just the girl-child. How about those that are managing to get some form of education and those that are responsible for educating them? What form of education and what quality of education is being provided?

Teachers are perhaps the most important actor in a child’s education. A significant body of research demonstrates that high-quality teaching is one of the biggest factors impacting students’ learning. The quality and effectiveness of education, training, and continuous professional development for teachers and other members of the education workforce should be a top priority for those working to strengthen quality-learning opportunities for all. This is not about the teachers alone in context of being classroom teachers but also about parents, vis a vis teaching and parenting. This, really, is the heart of my admonition.

Azeez Fashola, known as Naira Marley, a 25-year-old lad undoing the teaching and parenting that many kids are either getting or not getting at school and at home, is one of the many representations of a moral virus with the tag ‘Marlian’ echoing as a failed educational system and a failing parenting culture.

I come back again to my concerns. How do we re-educate a youthful population, a multitude of millennial lads who won’t wear belts on their trousers, and girls who won’t wear panties on certain days? How do we use education and parenting to tackle a growing alcohol/drugs abuse issue that the Marlian nation represents? How do we deal with a growing population of young persons with zero manners, poor cultural and traditional values?

For a generation that watch as their leaders plunder, loot and squander collective resources that should be used to better the society, it is not surprising that they find solace in the falsehood of lifestyles propagated in the lyrics of music they listen to and the celebrities they model their lives after. So, the  same group tell you that education is a scam.  How do we deliberately and intentional nip in the bud this growing generation through re-education? Is there a template which directs us at improving the quality and effectiveness of education, training, and continuous professional development for teachers and other members of the education workforce which includes parents?

The outsized impact of teachers on students’ learning makes it clear that successfully improving learning outcomes at scale will require reckoning with how to scale teachers’ professional development (TPD) in an effective, efficient and equitable way in a country where teaching is a leeway or gateway profession. Unemployment has made every graduate a possible teacher till the real job comes.

For a nation with dynamic contextualization and in need of addressing variation across contexts, further challenge lies in balancing the need to adapt the training content and approach to the local context for our children, for those who teach them, for those they look up to, for parents, while still maintaining essential elements amongst the citizenry so badly divided and fragmented across socio-political and ethno-religious leanings without equity and fair play, rule of law and justice. Is there hope?

Prince Charles Dickson PhD,

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