Nigeria operates a highly structured secondary school system.

Secondary school education in Nigeria is divided into junior secondary School (J.S.S) and senior secondary school (S.S.S). While junior secondary school provides you general knowledge on all the subjects areas- science, art, languages, technical and vocational classes, etc., senior secondary school is more structured.

The common practice in many secondary schools is to conduct aptitude tests or some other variation of an aptitude test in the final class of junior secondary to ascertain where students’ strengths lie. On the outcome of this aptitude test, students are grouped into science, art, technical sciences, and commercial classes and are thus restricted, in many respects, to subjects taught under the auspices of this generalised grouping system.

There is no doubt that the grouping is efficient, but what it does in actuality, is limit the subjects a student is capable of enrolling in. Going by the current system, calendars will inadvertently be set based on class divisions and not on the basis of courses available to be taken.

The effect of this grouping and the snowball effect it causes in creating academic calendars is the limitation of the subjects students from other classes can enroll in due to their commitments to their class's calendar, unavailable units or restriction by the school administration.

The Fallacy Of Sunk Cost

The fallacy of sunk cost means making decisions that affect the present based on past investments or effort put into a thing. It is highly irrational and very common in all spheres of life. In the context of the subject matter under consideration, the sunk cost fallacy is for a child to be boxed into an arbitrary grouping system that was based on a time where her/his interests were different from what they presently are.

The lack of flexibility in the system throws kids to embrace this fallacy unknowingly and limit their professional potential to only careers that their current syllabus prepares them for. Three years is a long time for interest to change and evolve in the life of a teenager and more room for manoeuvrability must be allowed.

A revision of the current system is suggested. Humans are dynamic beings that are constantly growing, changing and altering their interests. Systems imposed upon society must match the dynamism of human nature.

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In my secondary school, the system in place at that time was allow you take all the senior secondary school subjects in SS1, then separate into Science, Art and Commercial starting from SS2 all the way to your final exams in SS3.