Learning and its Challenges

An official report in Great Britain in 1818 described the overall outcome of education of all sorts in this period as a'' lamentable deficiency'' in education for the poor. Even though the voluntary effort was restricted to the towns, the country districts constituted wells of ignorance. It is to be noted that some districts in London had half of their population in the category of stark illiterates. Sadly, this is the situation in most states in Nigeria today. The vice of ignorance is now a dangerous threat to public order. The deliberate creation of the uneducated by the government at all levels is now the basis for misrule and poor governance. Political reasons for the deteriorated standards of education are visible everywhere in the country, even as political concessions have overwhelmed educational opportunities. The government discrimination at all levels, in public-owned educational institutions, has ensured that indigent children must be held responsible for their poverty, while the elite determines the happenings in the private-owned institutions with the aid of their wealth from known and unknown sources. According to John Stuart Mill, ''Education provided by the public must be education for all, and to be education for all it must be purely secular education. '' This is, however, not the case in Nigeria.

Of great worry is the fact that the country is in urgent need of suitably qualified and efficient teachers. Sadly, those available have, over time, displayed and exhibited little talent and questionable culture. Those in charge of quality assurance also fall within the range. The vicissitudes and challenges of life in several cities and towns have coarse and degraded many sections of the population to the extent that manners and culture have deteriorated rapidly. Indeed, most of the products of Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary levels of education are living examples to conclude that little or nothing was learned in these citadels of learning. This is disturbing.