(Education Continued)
In Educare Trust, we addressed over 50 socially relevant life-skill topics neglected by the ancient RRR-Reading, Writing, Arithmetic school curriculum. Today, each of those topics has NGOs dedicated to its dissemination. Such topics include Abortion, Activities, AIDS, Abuse, Alcohol, Athletics, Art, Boredom, Bullying, Budgeting Co-Curricular Activities, Career Choice, Corruption, Corporal Punishment Injuries, Crash Helmet/ Safety Belt Use, Creativity, Cultism, Diary Keeping, Data Base, Democracy, Development, Drug Abuse, Education, Entrepreneurship, Exhibition, Classroom Content, Care, Carelessness, Concern, Criticism, Exercise, Failure, Feedback, Finances, Friends, Friendly Learning, Environment, Intelligent Board Games, Giving/Taking, Guidance, Holi-School, Idleness, Instruments, Language, Leadership, Library, Meet-The-Expert, Mental Health, Mentorship, Music, Olaudah Equiano, Physical Health, Partnerships, Poetry, Prose, Posters, Photography, Reading, Recognition, Research, Quiz, Reward & Award, Self-Appraisal, Sign Language, Social Vices, Sports, Success, Sex, Talent Hunt, Think-Tank, Toilets, University Assess, Volunteerism, Values, Wall Charts, Youth Centres. Reader…please add your own.
All these topics are essential for students’ ‘Total Rounded Education’ and must be taught ‘in curriculum’ to Nigerian students and their counterparts in Africa and beyond. But they are not taught to most of our Nigerian 30+m primary school and almost 14m secondary school students in approximately 81,520 primary and 23,550 secondary schools [Source: Google search] unless an NGO shows up at the school.
NGO access to the school system is haphazard, potluck and not sustainable without parental, private sector and sometimes international funding and volunteerism through NGOs. Probably less than 1% of schools have, at best, epileptic access to one NGO. This does not include the ‘co-curricular needs’ of approximately 2.1m under and postgraduates in Nigeria’s 270 or so universities. Our students need more than sporadic NGO visits to haphazardly ‘perhaps’ learn ‘Essential Life Skills.’
NGOs cannot be a substitute for government-led archaic ‘Education Policies and Practice.’ Leaving this huge aspect of ‘The Total Education of the Complete Nigerian Student’ to NGOs has also consistently failed with consequent ill-prepared ‘poor life skilled Nigerian students’ in schools not reached by NGOs.
FOR EXAMPLE, HOW MUCH ‘CULT, DRUG, SICKLE CELL, & RESPECT FOR THE FEMALE EDUCATION IS IN THE CURRICULUM OR EVEN MENTIONED IN SCHOOLS IN A NIGERIA RIDDLED BY A HUGE CULTISM, DRUG, SICKLE CELL, VIOLENCE AND FEMALE ABUSE EPIDEMIC AMONG YOUTH? SCHOOL MUST BE WHERE VALUES ARE TAUGHT AND FIRST PRACTICED. There IS NO OR POOR GOVERNMENT SCHOOL ‘VALUES EDUCATION’ POLICY and most schools are off-radar and inaccessible to ‘Life Skill’ NGOs struggling to pay for personnel, equipment and transport to visit the Nigerian students in their classrooms.
Nigeria needs TO BROADEN THE CURRICULUM TO MAINSTREAM THESE CO-CURRICULAR TOPICS IN THE CURRICULUM AS CLASSROOM SUBJECTS and tertiary General Paper.
Historically school-based Clubs including Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, Red Cross, Blue Crescent, Man O’War, Literary and Debating, Science etc. were widespread in schools and did an amazing job of transferring many of the currently undertaken ‘Life skills’ tasks, including Volunteerism, now abandoned to NGOs to transfer. Many good schools have computers, Scrabble and other CLUBS in addition, but the reach and spread are inadequate.
It is up to Nigerian politicians in GOVERNMENT TO URGENTLY REUSE STAGNATING FUNDS OF UBEC (N1.39b in mid-2024) for the education of youth at state level. WE MUST COMBAT THE LOW NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT CONCEPT OF WHAT ‘A NIGERIAN SCHOOL’ SHOULD BE, OFFER AND PROVIDE.’ UN standard Nigerian ‘CHILD AND TEACHER FRIENDLY SCHOOL’ with adequate Classrooms, Toilets, Libraries and Laboratories and Education Facilities’ are not nuclear physics. They are the Right of our Children and Responsibility of Governance. Most Nigerian schools would fail ‘IS THIS A CATFS?’ examination. This is a failure of the system.
While awaiting State Police for states wanting it, in part response to new 2025 attack waves by ISIS and Boko Haram, President Tinubu rightly established a 130,000 Forest Rangers Force for our 1,129 forests i.e. approx. 115 per forest. This cannot be by federal character but by local recruitment content only but records can be the six Federal Zones e.g. North Central Zone Forest Rangers etc. Equipment quality, especially firepower, will counter combat constraints facing groups like AMOTEKUN, who have as a result needlessly lost gallant Fellow Nigerian members. May the Government educate their children and pay a Died-On-Active-Service Pension to their wives. What weapons will be ‘allowed’ for our FR? And what supervision will stop the FR in turn terrorising the forest dwellers as unsupervised ‘uniforms’ do nationwide?
The Forest Rangers organisers would need a similar army of IT experts for the deployment of a 130,000 Forest Drone Deployment Strategy for grid-based surveillance, heat-sensitive and real-time Combat Capacity with a Drone Squadron HQ for backup. These are security jobs for 13,000 or 130,000 backup frontline IT youth – right there. To anticrime and anti-terrorism, add anti-smuggling, agricultural and tourist advantages. Proper IT and drones will catapult our forests into the 21st Century with vital data available to universities and other bodies.
As we plan a 2025 Security Summit, including Forest Ranger surveillance, note MEDIA SILENCE & SECRECY and the stupidity of prior announcement of ‘Operation Hopping Cockroach’ on the air alerting terrorists to go on short leave. Update and improve the 9th ASSEMBLY SECURITY STRATEGY which cost untold millions with State Police, drone development partnerships, IT recruitments in security, bank and court-ordered cellphone surveillance, undercover work and communications monitoring. ONLY ENCIRCLEMENT, CAPTURE OR DESTRUCTION and only then the media announcement is the tested battle plan. Take our security to the IT level.
