WHAT ARE EDUCATION AUTHORITIES DOING?

Though an engineer, I'm privileged to regularly interact with schoolchildren and their books. My observations have perpetually evoked fear for the future of Nigeria and Nigerians. The days ahead when badly trained MBBS degree holders would begin to perform heart surgeries, and shoddily groomed B Eng Civil Eng'g guys would begin to supervise bridges and skyscrapers construction, then your guess is as true as mine.

Here are some disturbing realities I've personnally uncovered.

-Primary and secondary schools textbooks are now replete with all sorts of unprintable errors: numberless typos, unpardonable grammars, weird assertions, wacky calculations and wrong answers to exercises.

-Patently unqualified teachers now man the classes and handle sensitive subjects. An SS2 Maths teacher, among other academic taboos, has continued to maintain that -3-5=+8 instead of -8; and that sine145=sine14.5 (when he couldn't find sine145 on the 4FigTable)! Is sine145 not sine(180-145) = sine 35?
Another Physics teacher (in other school) did set 25 questions, out of which 9 were outrightly wrong, for his SS2 pupils. Can you imagine a data-based question on Momentum without even the remotest hint at Velocity? This same man is the one still preparing those innocent children for the fast approaching SSCE and UTME.

-A JSS2 girl who couldn't solve y-5=15 and other elementary Arithmetics (when I casually tried her) was actually double-promoted to SS1, instead of JS3 (if she truly passed). The school proprietor told the widowed mum "because the girl is so brilliant"! This was an evil stratagem to make the illiterate woman believe that that school was an oven where geniuses were readily baked out.

These observations of mine, I've discovered, are commonplace across Nigeria. Governments and Education authorities should swiftly move to institute the following:

1: All (text)books meant for school children must be statutorily made to pass through Boards of Examiners before being permitted into the public. Books already out there should be systematically scrutinized for corrections, re-approvals and disapprovals.

2:All teachers, in public and private schools, must be routinely subjected to tests, on all subjects that they (pretend to) teach(ing) the pupils.

3:The culture, long dead, of forcing pupils who failed a class to repeat same class must be vehemently revived.

Already, most children have failed morally; adding academic failure to it would be nothing but a 23:59hours time bomb for everyone.

-Darcy Float wrote from Ondo State. And God knows these assertions of mine are true.