President of Architects Registration Council of Nigeria (ARCON), Architect Oladipo Ajayi, has called on the Federal Government to review the present curriculum in institutions across the country, saying that the curriculum is currently narrowing the scope of students’ knowledge.
The ARCON boss canvassed this position during an interactive session with newsmen in Lagos, to mark his 66th birthday celebration, pointing out that the inability of government to monitor and ensure full implementation of its policies in the education sector had created imbalance in the nation’s education system.
Ajayi, while emphasising that the duty of ARCON as to promote the standard of education in Architecture; raise the standard of practice and register members, give licenses and ensure they have good conducts, lamented that some universities in the country had not been cooperating with the council in its bid to carry out due process and ensure they produce quality graduates.
“We have been speaking to the Nigerian Universities Commission (NUC) and efforts are on to marry what we have with what NUC has in order to come up with good policy.
“The curriculum of training in our institutions today are wrong, not only in architecture but in all our institutions. Government has good policies but they don’t follow them up.
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“We need to go back to the system of training the hands and train the brain. That is what we need in the country, not just the paper certificates that we are carrying about.
“Personally I believe in technicians and para-medicals. People can really make a lot of money and be fulfilled professionally by doing that but the issue is that nobody wants to be called a paramedical staff but a medical doctor,” Ajayi said.
Harping on the problem of people attending unaccredited universities, the ARCON boss said both the students and their parents were guilty, arguing that “they ought to have gone to the affected institutions to do their verification before accepting admissions into such schools.”
Speaking further, Ajayi said ARCON’s recent visit to the National Assembly to submit paper on procurement on whether to raise mobilisation fees, among other issues had started to yield the desired results as the lawmakers had started to consider their position.
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