How curious that in an Education forum, it seems that little is said about the subject of Education itself.  Since I find it odd, I feel that I should be the one to start.

What is education to you?  It is the ingestion of unrelated facts?  Is it the regurgitation of those facts upon a blank page which measures the degree to which one is educated?  Is it holding a gilded leaf of paper which says that you are a graduate from one institution or another?  Perhaps, even, it is something which exceeds these?

As I remember hearing once, "education is that which you retain long after you have forgotten all that you learned at school."  Nothing could be more true.  For one can forget when Nigeria's First Republic ended, when Rome fell, or what the Theory of Relativity is and it would not detract from one's education.  But to leave school without a love of learing, a desire to read to broaden one's horizons, to seek to understand one's world is both a tragedy and an abject failure on the parts of those who were charged with your educational development.

Yet, even as I say these things, the practices of education systems, not only in Nigeria, but across the globe, suggests that the world is simply fine with this.  History is not taught as a means of understanding one's past and profiting from the successes and learning from the failures of our ancestors, but as a series of events and dates completely unrelated to we who live in the present day.  Math is merely a method of torturing students with numbers rather than a rather than a method in which we give order to our world.

Even as a ten year old returning to Nigeria from the United States for a visit, I could see that something was seriously wrong with the way things worked.  What I believe was the equvalent of an American Third Grade class was learning about multiplication for the first time.  Their experience was "2 x 2 = 4, 2 x 3 = 6, 2 x 4 = 8."  Later, during their break, I talked to one of the boys and asked him how school was for him.  He said that it was "very boring".  During the course of conversation, we ended up talking about Math and I asked him if he understood what was being taught.  He says "the teacher told me to learn it, does it matter?"  When I explained to him that multiplication is mearly addition in a series, it looked like a light came on.  No one had ever explained what exactly multiplication was.  How can one learn like this?!

Now, lest this be thought an isolated incidence, I have spoken to both the parents of students and students themselves in Nigeria and their stories are much the same.  How can our country move forward when the populace is so poorly educated, not only for a lack of resources (becuase those in power see book as nonsense) but becuase, the way material is taught, itself, is terrible?

And so I ask you, is this what education should be?  If you say no, then please, tell us all what path we should begin to take.

see dis one talk w/ oyinbo-sense.

u r talking about 9ja. b4 u ask what we would do, what r u going to do?