With Adekunle Adekoya

Later this month, we will celebrate the Nigerian children’s Day, on May 27. But from the way I see it, about the only thing we are going to get is the benefit of two days away from work and all that entails, especially if you live in bustling cities like Lagos and Port Harcourt, and other urban centres that are emulating Lagos in traffic unmanageability. That, and the bland, vacuous rhetoric of Children’s Day speeches.

Anyway, this is about our children, and their future. Once upon a time, the stated objectives of education in Nigeria is literacy in the three Rs — Reading, (W)riting, and ‘Rithmetic. Almost one hundred years after that, what are the stated objectives of Nigerian education in the 21st century?

From the Nigerian National Conference on Education of 1969, which fathered the 6-3-3-4 system of education, when last was there a major national event on Nigerian education? The 6-3-3-4 itself has been panel-beaten several times, and it has now become 9-3-4. Despite the serial tinkerings with our educational system, it remains a system in which all of us have little confidence.

Were that not to be the case, we would not be breaking our backs to secure funds with which we can educate them in other countries. Those who are in charge of our affairs must think the world is flat, until others proved them wrong. If not, is it not time to convene another national conference on education in the 21st century, given the fact that in this country, rapid transformations are being wrought in the way we live simply because we have a robust telecommunications sector?

Most adults, and parents will agree that their children can do far more with GSM handsets than the parents who buy and own them. Is that not a simple indicator that the entire concept of learning, as is operated now, should change? In this day and age, schools are still talking of blackboards, when children in other countries have keyed into age of keyboard and motherboard! Well, how are they going to get keyboards when there are no desks to place them on? How will they know of motherboards when very few schools have electricity, not to talk of broadband?

The colleges of education have the function of training teachers for the lower levels of our educational system — pre-school, nursery, and primary. What is the quotient of IT in the curriculum of teacher education? It stands to reason that if teachers are not IT compliant, the pupils will not be. And then, the faculties of education in the universities, who are tasked to train teachers for the secondary tier. The same question applies: what is the level of IT in their curriculum? How many lecture halls in how many colleges of education are computer-equipped?

A disturbing trend in all of this is that some parents can afford to buy computers for their children at home, but the problem is that the learning which such “home infrastructure”affords is unstructured and can neither be measured nor evaluated. In fact, with internet, such unsupervised learning can be dangerous.

In the interest of our children, it is time to pay requisite attention to teacher education along ICT lines. The global institutions have tried to help us but much is wrong, as our failure with the MDGs have shown. If we go by UNESCO’s EFA (Education for All) and every government in this country makes at least 26 per cent of the budget available for education, we might me able to fund the IT requirements of 21st century education. It is a shame that eleven years into the 21st century, the Federal Ministry of Education has no policy on ICT in education.