Education is generally defined as an aggregate of all the processes by which a child or young adult develops his/her abilities, attitudes and other forms of behaviour which are of value to the society in which he/she lives. It is the conscious training of the young to a life useful to him/her and to the society to which he belongs. In line with this, Osindeinde (1999) stated that education is an organized and sustained
communication designed to bring about learning which involves the acquisition of basic and necessary skills, knowledge and competence by the learner to change his/her attitude positively towards contributing to the national economic development. It is the society that educates the child, and such education starts from early years of life popularly referred to as life-long education. Education provides the child the opportunities to discover self and become useful and self-reliant. The various levels of education, which are applicable to the Nigerian situation, include the pre-primary, primary, secondary, as well as tertiary. To catch up with the rest of the world, Nigeria has joined other developing countries in the quest for economic and technological improvement through education. Whereas this is the case, a trip down the lane of education indicates that education in Nigeria has been declining in purpose. While some believe that the standard of education in Nigeria has fallen, others do not agree, arguing that the standard has not fallen, but the quality has fallen.
Generally, when people talk about the ‘standard of education’ in Nigeria, they seem to compare what the products of education could do in yesteryears to what it can do today. For example, it is the belief of people that most things the primary school leavers of yesteryears could do, cannot be effectively done by secondary students of today. For example, products of primary schools of yesteryears could easily write letters, whereas secondary school students of today cannot.
The views of scholars on the standard of education vary. This is because there is no well defined instrument to measure it with utmost reliability and validity, and so, it is a relative term. Scholars view standard of education from different perspectives, depending on the angle each of them is looking at it from.
According to Ifedili and Ochuba (2009), “educational standards set out the quality of education that is acceptable to her citizens. It provides for purpose, direction and criteria for performance evaluation. The government sets the policies and the policies are implemented by the masses. The extent to which these policies are implemented are judged by the standards”. Teachers without Boarders (2006) reported that the standard of education is how the products of schools can be measured in terms of outcome. That is, a measure of how school leavers contribute to the society in terms of cognitive, affective and psychomotor. This is in terms of skills, knowledge and right attitude acquired by graduates the country produces. When the standard is low, half-baked graduates are produced. These graduates go into the market with less than knowledge and less skills and often with dubious attitudes.
Level of Decline of Education in Nigeria
The continuing decline in educational standards in Nigeria especially as shown in public examination and the performance of education outputs that are inadequate for employment has engendered public outcry. For instance, FME (2006) stated that an average of 13.8 percent and 20.72 percent of candidates who sat for the West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) and the National Examination Council Certificate examination (NECOCE) between 2000 and 2006 had five credits (including Mathematics and English) respectively. Most recently, 98.25% of all those that sat NECO examinations in 2009 could not obtain five subject passes.
Nigeria launched the Universal Primary Education (UPE) in 1976, but, the programme failed due to lack of fund. Nigeria has again launched another mass oriented education programme, the Universal Basic Education (UBE). The President, Olusegun Obasanjo, declared during the launching of the programme in Sokoto that the nation “cannot afford to fail this time around.” However, not long after that, the federal government reported that the falling standard of education in Nigeria is caused by “acute shortage of qualified teachers in the primary school level.” It is reported that about 23% of the over 400,000 teachers employed in the nation’s primary schools do not possess the Teachers’ Grade Two Certificate, even when the National Certificate of Education (NCE) is the minimum educational requirement one should posses to teach in the nation’s primary schools (Ogbeifum and Olisa; 2001). In most of the states of the federation, no teacher has been employed since the take off of democratic governance. At least in a state well known to the writer, the later military governments hardly employed teachers. The situation now is that the existing teachers though well aged seemed very close to retirement. For the success of the UBE programme, pertinent questions that may be asked include: has the government trained the required number and quality of teachers needed for full implementation of the programme? What is the level of motivation for the teachers to ensure quality teaching? What is the state of infrastructure for the full implementation of the programme? Answers to these questions do not seem to be in the affirmative. It does seem that like the sister, the universal primary education, the programme seems heading towards failure.

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