I recently wrote a small business feasibility study at a some point i spoke of the prospect of selling a societal magazines in the north " due to the high level of illiteracy in the region" That was one part of the document i am sure most students will not understand, even me i almost do not understand it because the idea that there is "Illiteracy" everywhere in the north has spread like one of those new meaningless songs virtually in every household in the south.
That almost everyone in the north can read and write Hausa and /or Arabic is somehow not literacy, they must read and write English to be said to be able to read and write. so you find people who say " how come he went to school for that long and he cant speak good English". But a more reasonable question would have been "how come he went to school and he can only speak English".
If education is, among other things,supposed to prepare us to meet the world, then the most spoken language in the world should count even when we acknowledge that for this same reason of orientation its not widely spoken. more people speaks Spanish than English, and the people who speaks Chinese in the world triple, in number, those who speak English. But in our one-way thinking of education, if you cant speak a particular brand of English you are not literate. This narrowness is recognized and approved of, sadly by our higher institution so that the very first education that our schools need is that English, itself, is not a the whole of education, English is a language.
Some may argue that English is given this premium because is the lingua franca of the country but there is nothing in the psychology of education that say education should be done in the lingua franca, if anything there is much that says it should be done in the language of birth of the person to be educated. To borrow the statement of Olakunle Soriyan that "everything in a room is Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics,and Physics as far as education classify them. Any nation which teaches these in a language other than the language of birth of its children is already disadvantaged" because the first have to learn the language before learning the knowledge.
We say less emphasis be given to English in courses not related to English. This way a man who knows Economics, Commerce and Trade, in and out, can be in authority of finance and business even if all he understand of language is Igbo. As earlier said, educated people of our time should speak more than one language but if they must speak just one language it should be either the language of their birth or the language of their choice, not the language of the school forcing.
The second area in which our school need education is the area of testing. often times what is tested is the memory of the student and not his knowledge. I f a mathematics question is posed and there are 15 steps to solving it. A student will fail if the formula escapes him even if he remembers and knows too well 14 of the 15 steps. Another student who does not know 14 of the 15 steps will pass better because he remembers the formula and step 1. This is testing memory and still, in a very wrong way.
Someone recently said exams cant be done over the internet and my response was you do think exams cant be done over the internet because of what you have come to know as exams. An event during which you are to remember what you were told and write it down. But if we truly want to educate people then exams should be an exercise during which your understanding and ability to utilize information is assessed, so that the needed information can even be presented to you during it. This way you can have the internet to yourself and you still will be unable to cheat because you are not being asked to recall the information. This will expand the possible achievement of a student as what comes out of him will not narrowly guided reproduction but a creative interpretation and utilisation of information.
In summary, to ensure that our schools give education, we must first educate it and to that effect, Two major area is humbly suggested; flexibility in language of education, utilisation of more productive testing patterns. If you wont agree with anything i have said so far, you will at least agree that our education system needs discussion and better ideas. we cant keep wasting human resources in this manner. Something needs to be done.
