Nigerians are a curious breed. Think of us as the proverbial coastal dwellers dying of thirst. We complain of parched tongues, but every day, we defecate in our fresh springs and struggle to slake our thirst with poisonous waters from abroad.
Beyond metaphor, Nigeria must be rescued from cognitive dissonance; the mental racket that triggers the Nigerian lust to relocate abroad and sustains it.
Ultimately, it poisons our wellsprings of civilisation and knowledge: culture, family and academia. This corruptive mentality pervades the country’s educational and cultural institutions, aggravating the brain drain that robs Nigeria of the allegiance and contributions of promising citizenry.
The multiple failures that beset the country, from the bungled economy to our subversive partisanship, to our lack of universal health care, to protracted terrorism, and the neocolonialist afflictions of our politics and media, can be adduced to the institutions that produce and sustain our political elite.
Our local schools and even the elite schools most Nigerians throng abroad, hardly teach students to question and think. They focus instead on creating legions of effective systems managers via standardised tests and passive submission to authority.
Eventually, when the systems fail the managers, they scurry out of the country in search of greener pastures abroad. When the going gets tough, they simply pack up and leave.
The responsibility for the collapse of the Nigerian economy runs from the corridors of power, through the media soapbox to the lecture theatres of the academia; it pervades our banking halls, the comatose industry and the random trade zones of municipal sidewalks.
Scholarship is crucial to the rejuvenation of our comatose state thus Nigeria must furnish an educational system that facilitates fearless intellectual inquiry; one that is constructively critical of authority, fiercely independent, and selfless.
We must quit organising learning around minutely specialised disciplines, tapered solutions, and rigid structures designed to produce predetermined answers. As the government fixates on science education, it must equally furnish our arts and humanities.
Nigeria must rejig her cultural foundations and ethical complex – and this is achievable through a partnership between the government and the arts & humanities. The result of such an endeavour would excite a social re-engineering built on character mending and economic restoration in consonance with our peculiar strengths and weaknesses.
Restoring our cultural dominance would facilitate easier salvage of our society, particularly the engine wheels of our industrial complex. China, Japan, Germany, Indonesia, Sweden, among others, attained progress by founding their governance on a cultural experience indigenous to them.
The wild pursuit of materialism renders large segments of our business and political elite addicted to mindless acquisition of ill-gotten wealth. Thus the ceaseless cases of corruption in public office. The lives of several culprits are funded by stolen money and beastly monopolies facilitated by heinous social and political contracts.
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On the flip side of the equation, the working class diminishes and struggles to maintain membership in the informal social caste imposed upon it by a raptorial ruling class.
The general run of the masses supposedly dissents but many do so without any real awareness of the actuality of forms that define their existence. Plato’s allegory of the cave was meant to explain this. In the allegory, he likens people untutored in the Theory of Forms to prisoners chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads. Plato’s allegory speaks to our individual and collective fate as a nation.
For Socrates, all virtues were forms of knowledge thus to train someone to manage a business account for Price Water Cooper, for instance, is to educate him or her in skill. To train them to debate the ethics of a business venture is to educate them on values and morals. A culture that disregards the vital interplay between morality and power, writes Hedges, condemns itself to death.
Such existential truths are scorned by the modern fortune hunter. And the disconnect subsists across professions, government, and academia. Nigerian economists, for instance, chant elaborate theoretical models yet know little of how their fancy, soulless economics impact rural poetry and suburban lives.
Our educational and social systems must quit churning out such products of a cultural void, casualties of a system that produces graduates who have been taught to cheat the system and applaud theft as a shrewd corporate strategy.
The true purpose of education must be to make minds, not social cannibals. Education must furnish us with patriots capable of leading Nigeria’s charge back to rebirth.
A recourse to educational foundations, in the light of Arnold’s 1869 treatise, could be in Nigeria’s best interest. This is attainable by conscious endeavour. President Bola Tinubu could lay the foundation for such a monument by increasing Nigeria’s education budget to 18 per cent or thereabouts, from the disgraceful fraction – usually less than seven per cent – budgeted over the years.
The foundations of scholarship and knowledge must be reconstructed to guarantee more progressive responses to internal problems of social advancement: problems of work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the true value of life.
Our quest for effective public governance can only be realised through the guidance of skilled thinkers, and a synergy between a public service that works and a humane corporate business sector.
Nigeria could take a cue from Finland’s educational system. The transformation of the Finnish education system began some 40 years ago as the key propellent of the country’s economic recovery plan. Educators had little idea it was so successful until 2000, when the first results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardised test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the best young readers in the world.
Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science. In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide.
There are no mandated standardised tests in Finland, apart from one exam at the end of students’ senior year in high school. There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions. Finland’s schools are publicly funded. School managers at all levels are educators, not businessmen or politicians. Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators.
The result is that a Finnish child has a good shot at getting the same quality education irrespective of his or her descent. The differences between the weakest and strongest students in Finland are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
True knowledge essentially translates to being an emissary of truth, hope, superior culture and progress. It is never simply to teach bread-winning, furnish teachers for the public schools or vocation for the unemployed. It should above all, be an appendage of that fine adjustment between what Du Bois calls reality and the flourishing knowledge of life – an improvement of civilisation and a solution to its seemingly intractable problems.
The end product of such an educational process would be less likely to abscond in the face of odds because he or she must have learnt to courageously vie for truth and progress, not for vulgar repute or profit.
