For the literary experts who may find themselves reading this blog, I humbly say, concerning the title, “no pun intended”. For those who are less concerned about lexicology, what you read as the title is exactly what I intended – getting schooled so as to be ‘entooled’. (Apologies to the lexicologists again).
Almost every dictionary I consulted defined ‘schooling’, for humans, as ‘education and/or training as obtained from schools’. The emphasis became necessary when I discovered that animals too could be ‘schooled’, though outside the classrooms.
Paraphrasing now, schooling should be about getting education from schools.
I know what you are thinking! What is education? Right?Dictionary.com defines education as the act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life.
Many other books and authors also define education along the line of knowledge acquisition, knowledge processing via reasoning and judgment and knowledge application to problem solving and general life improvement.
But looking at the educational system in Nigeria in the last two decades, one cannot see even a mere semblance of the aforementioned description given to education.
Besides poor and, in some cases, complete lack of educational infrastructure, the attitude of Nigerians and our government towards the true, core value of knowledge is grossly unbecoming. We go to school for the simple and mundane purpose of getting a fanciful piece of paper glorified as a Certificate; when the certified is never certain of what to do with the outcome of his 4+x years of studying and writing exams in a university.
Since all that matters to a potential employer is the grade on a graduate’s certificate in the present day Nigeria, a typical undergraduate learns to spend the last few weeks or even days of the semester cramming all that he can only to pour it in the examiner’s answer book and wait for the result. If he is a good ‘crammer’, wholaaa! He scores an ‘A’ or a ‘B’.
Did I forget to mention that the scenario above only applies to an honest, above-average student? Oh! A ‘sharp’ student may actually not need those qualities and need not undergo that level of stress. All he needs is his fat purse, a lecturer that ‘understands’ and, in some cases, an intermediary between the examiners and their ‘examinees’. In this case, the ‘A’ have been found to come with higher degrees of certainty than in the previous scenario because it has a quantifiable price.
However, in both cases, what I call ‘residual knowledge’ is near-zero after the semester.
This shoddy educational pattern cuts across the entire tiers of schooling in the country – primary, secondary, tertiary and even post-graduate levels. Parents and teachers aid their children/pupils in exam malpractices at primary and secondary levels and students and lecturers team up to commit academic atrocities in our tertiary schools. Even doctorate degrees are questionable these days. Someone once gave a mock meaning of PhD as ‘Politics’, ‘hardwork’ and ‘Dobale’. Dobale means ‘to prostrate’. It wasn’t difficult for me to see that even the ‘hardwork’ part of the mock meaning is the only word that begins with a small letter. Can we really argue if someone concludes that ‘hardwork’ is the least important item among the identified three? Even the ‘dobale’ starts with a capital ‘D’ – P h D indeed.
There is a huge disconnect between knowledge acquisition and application in our society. A young Nigerian today doesn’t go to school to be shaped into a tool. Oladele Afolabi is a seasoned technology policy expert and strategist. He commented that “we tend to have lost the real essence of schooling and education.” We really need to understand the value of knowledge. This will automatically affect our approach to its acquisition, application and appreciation.
To be continued.
God bless Nigeria.
