Reasons Why Nigeria's Educational System Will Soon Crash

We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a
thing.”
                                                 ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

• In beginners level at elementary school, it’s the teachers. Stand up and recite multiplication table two and three is the rule and order of programme before dispensing what the government asked them to teach us. They tell us what to do, tell us when to urinate and when to write, anything outside this, you are disrespecting him or her. Never for once are we given the chance to get to relate that which is within and maybe find an atmosphere for exploring it. We live pur lives based on instruction and commands from the teacher. We are taught what to say in private and public and we are expected to bring it forth during test and examinations just as we have been taught. The good ones and genius are the one who are good at memorizing and producing what the teacher has taught us. Our system has made our teacher the dictator who can make a classroom rise or sit as one, they who show off the beauty of math and the logic of art, they who are doing their job. Isn’t it a shame that normalcy has become a standardized lecture and a standardized worksheet, that if you raise your hand and the teacher actually answers your question, well, count yourself lucky kid, not everyone gets to have a teacher like that.

In secondary school, it’s the age and introduction of more irrelevant subjects. Secondary school education is not the amount of information that is pushed into the brain and causes havoc there, undigested all through a lifetime. Secondary school education should be a symposium of life-building, character- making and assimilation of ideas in the pursuit of building a more harmonious, peaceful and truly civilized world but reverse is the case for Nigeria secondary school education system as it is the age teenagers are left alone to face the other side of life they are not hoping to face because it has been proven that societies without the concept of “teenager” do not experience what we do: the rebellion, the uncertainty, the generation of ducklings struggling to either accept their ugliness as beauty or else become swans, we haven’t yet quite figured out which we ought to teach them. It’s the age, and some of the parents, the ones who send their children off to school and then wash their hands of teaching their kids anything, such as how to be a functioning member of society, or even just a decent human being, and then when they get those calls home at nine p.m., they cry “where did I go wrong?”, which we know is far too little and far too late.

• In university, it’s the institution. A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library. Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in. University educational system is a set students packed into a lecture hall with a professor at the front, worked out in the scientifically optimized ratio of one-thousand students to one teacher. It’s the interesting courses that have no value to your real-world career path, and then the boring ones that do. University can teach you skill and give you opportunity, but it can't teach you sense, nor give you understanding. Sense and understanding are produced within one's soul.lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays… Am I right? And that’s why we have disillusioned graduates with useless degrees. 

Education is curiosity – it is looking at the world around you with the eyes of the child you buried long ago, of always asking “why” and never taking “it just is” as an answer. I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the education system. It’s that we blame the system for our education and that we think of education as a system. Though nobody can go back and make a new beginning... Anyone can start over and make a new ending.