Wanted! Education in a Knowledge Era

The falling standard in education in Nigeria could be linked to lack of vision on the part of education system managers to see big changes in knowledge – in how people see knowledge and how they use it.

This because in this Knowledge Age or innovation-driven age, knowledge is a key asset for a society to create value.

The current curriculum in Nigeria’s schools is mess because it lacks information and communications technology (ICT) ingredients leaving the system to churn out half-baked graduates.

And despite the compelling need to raise a new generation of ICT driven graduates, Nigerian leaders still pay no attention to the complete makeover of the schools’ curriculum.

When they pretend they pay attention, it is too little to make any impact and that why the country has continued to produce semi educated school leavers.

Particularly disturbing is the fact that most Nigerian graduates leave institutions of higher learning without even touching a computer, leaving them without requisite skills to integrate into the ICT driven business environment.

This is the sorry state of the school system in the country where the overall ingredients needed to galvanise Nigeria’s beleaguered economy is in short supply.

From the high cost price of computer hardware and software to apathy and to lack of concerted investment in information technology training, Nigerian graduates have remained inferior to their counterparts’ elsewhere.

Also, most school teachers from primary to tertiary also lack the skills to fully utilize technology in curriculum implementation hence the traditional chalk and duster approach still dominates in school pedagogy.

Though, few Nigeria universities already have computer study as part of their academic programmes, most of them are still theoretical in nature to impact meaningfully on the graduates and society.

But the main problem is the absence of holistic plan for technology in the country.

The Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council with a mandate in curriculum development has remained largely ineffectual in developing a curriculum with emphasis on creative thinking, entrepreneurial skills, positive social and cultural values.

It is so bad that 80per cent of the Nigerian universities and polytechnics, offering Computer Science as a course still include obsolete topics in their curriculum.

The way forward is to develop an effective curriculum that includes communications, numeracy, information technology, and social skills units, with specific, specialized teaching of each.

It is also important to attract and retain qualified and experienced IT lecturers as well as build state-of-the-art laboratories.

Government should also heed the suggestion of the NCS that lecturers in Nigeria’s Tertiary institutions be retrained through the assistance of Nigeria IT professionals in the diaspora as IT core training in Nigeria or abroad is very expensive for individual professionals to bear.