The Sum of our Education

Oyinkan Medubi

Going by the state of things, all the educated folks in this country are owing the schools that nurtured them an explanation. They have not given a good account of themselves. Luckily, my education is not yet complete

SO, reader, as we were saying, the Nigerian’s multi-split personality, which makes him at once a psychopath and a scheming, conniving devil, continues to be the subject of our discourse. I must warn you though that this discourse is not for the squeamish. Tackling an Aro patient is never easy. No Pele or Ronaldo is deft enough for the job.

Did I tell you how much I admire art? It is that medium that speaks directly to the soul of the observer. That is why no one ever understands it. No one can with any clarity say exactly what a piece of art means, sadly, not even the creator. Most artists that I know will acknowledge that they stand humbled and befuddled before their creation, wondering what the sculpture is saying. The Almighty is doing that right now about Nigerians.

It is one thing for one to know what an artwork is; it is another to know what it says. I mean, most people recognise the sculpture, Venus de Milo, but they are still scratching their heads over what she is saying, especially by those missing arms. So people are going, is she saying that it is ok not to have arms, or to have incomplete arms or that beauty does not need arms to rule the world?

I am equally befuddled by the value of the Nigerian’s education. I lay awake at nights, wondering just what value to place on it, and also perhaps because I am hungry and don’t want to get up. Never mind that. The point is that going by most people’s actions, ideologies, and utterances, I am hard put to it to ascribe a particular value. Most of the time, what I am getting is a value of someone who fails to apprehend the totality of the opportunities given him/her to shape the destiny of their country and become a hero.

I once had a teacher, a foreigner, who tried unsuccessfully to teach me how to measure value, mathematically. He would ask the class what the value of x was if y was this and z was that. Honestly, for most of us in the art class (I was not alone, thank God), that man might have been talking Greek. I think he was talking Greek for not only did we fail to understand, we failed the exams.

A long time ago, I learnt to measure the exact value of my stew by the way the children ate it. If the plate came back half-full, it meant the stew was passable. If the plate came back clean, it meant it was edible. If the plate came back broken, it meant someone attempted to eat it with the stew. That meant an excellent score; my stew was very educated.

Of course, I couldn’t apply the dish measurement to everything, especially to things like knowing the sum of our education. How can, when there are close to two hundred million Nigerians, many of them with tongues saltier than Lot’s wife, sourer than lemon, or just plain twisted? No sir, the voice of my education has told me to avoid things like pelted tomatoes, rotten eggs and other unprintable measurements of displeasure.

There is an unfortunate fact, and that is that the level of progress in a country is directly tangential to the progressive inclinations of the leaders. It’s a ‘garbage in, garbage out’ situation. This means that the country’s progress can be no greater than the ideas (or lack of it) of the least educated of its leaders. We can therefore surmise that the amount of progress (or lack of it) we are witnessing in the Nigerian nation is directly proportional to the amount of educated ideas displayed by the Nigerian in leadership. I don’t know if you follow that logic, because I don’t.

Anyway, education, says Ambrose Bierce, the American writer, ‘…is that which discloses to the wise, and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.’ Sorry, I searched for a shorter definition… But wait, there’s Thomas Haliburton who said that ‘a college education shows a man how little other people know.’ No, that doesn’t do it for me; it does not show how little he himself knows. I will, however, not give you my own definition yet; I’ll just let these people continue to beat about the bush.

Seriously, nothing has shown us the value of our collective education in this country than the current COVID pandemic. As we have said here, and many others as well, Nigerians know what to do, but their personal failure to grasp the value of their own education has prevented them, and it has remained that, their personal failures (PF). It is often said to be indexical to character. Take the matter of distributing relief packages, for instance. It was so bad it was alleged that even the children that were already in their parents’ homes were still being fed by the government, on paper.

Oscar Wilde said that ‘society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue cleverer than another.’ Since we take it that most of our leaders have been produced by this society, we cannot complain that we have us our own locally produced err… ‘leaders’. Indeed, education has also made them very clever ‘leaders’ indeed. So then, it seems that our education is working in Nigeria. We have nothing to complain about. Or don’t we?

Listen, when I read what Theodore Roosevelt said, that ‘a man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad,’ I thought, maybe, we really don’t have anything to complain about. So far, our news reports have told us how our freight cars are being robbed blind and blotto, but at least we still have the railroad, right? Some, though, have looked at this statement, and then looked at our debt profile, looked at the other indices of progress, and have burst into tears, again like the Almighty was said to have done once over Nigeria.

The reason for the tears? The COVID came to expose to them the sad fact that we have had no governmental presence since independence due to the absence of any solid social structure. Imagine, when the lockdown came and we were asked to stay at home, some people had to stay under the bridge the entire period. Now, howzat for progress?

I read a report last week on the value placed on online studying by some people who had participated in a study. I found it rather instructive that the study confirmed some of the notions already mentioned on this column and others that the method of instruction leaves a lot of gaps in the students’ educational journey. Among other reasons was the absence of structural support systems such as affordability in its entirety for the average student.

I find it saddening that when the Nigerian gets into a position of authority, his/her principal preoccupation is not how to contribute to making life better for the citizens so that affordability can be ensured for most if not all in any venture of progress. Rather, the character of the Nigerian, no matter the level of their education, seems to propel him/her to make life more unaffordable for other Nigerians. We have taken psychopathic behaviour to a magnificent level.

Our thesis? The sum of our education is not being brought to bear on our national life. Going by the state of things, all the educated folks in this country are owing the schools that nurtured them an explanation. They have not given a good account of themselves. Luckily, my education is not yet complete.