January 24th every year is dedicated by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) to celebrate the role of education for peace and development. The UNGA is interested in inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong opportunities for all, so as to achieve gender equality and break the cycle of poverty that is leaving millions of children, youth and adults behind. What really are some of the factors responsible for this dip and how can these be remedied? What steps can be taken to improve the performance of the putative “leaders of tomorrow”? The Bible asks a germane rhetorical question where it says inter alia, “If the foundation be destroyed, what can the righteous do?” The righteous should carry out research to discover factors responsible for the new low in our educational system. Some of the identified and obvious factors responsible for the dip in quality include lack of proper monitoring of the educational sector, uninspired students and in some cases laziness, demotivated teachers, preponderant poverty, aloofness of parents and the negative debilitating effects of “Boko Haram” activists who for close to one and a half decades now, have been campaigning that Western education is a scam amongst other factors.
On its part, UNICEF recommended the following steps to improve the sector and I concur into:
Improve access to education through proactive measures to reduce the number of out-of-school children in the country which currently stands at over 20 million children
The Nigerian government should also provide safe, secure and violence-free learning environment for learning
It should scale up foundational literacy and numeracy programmes
Offer digital skills and employability skills to adolescents to facilitate the school to work transition
Increase domestic spending on education to 20 percent of the national budget as against the between 5 and 7 percent currently being spent on education
Employ a sufficient number of teachers and provide adequate classrooms and libraries
Provide teaching aids
Improve quality of teaching and learning at the basic foundational level
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EduTimes Africa, a product of Education Times Africa, is a magazine publication that aims to lend its support to close the yawning gap in Africa's educational development.
