GOVERNOR Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State and his primary school teachers recently offered the country a classic evidence of the collapse of the foundation of education in an astounding literacy drama. A female primary school teacher for 20 years was unable to read her age declaration affidavit. Even when the governor prodded her by reading the text and asked her to repeat after him, she stuttered. The drama lasted for about five minutes. This is most shameful. It is a serious indictment of the training, recruitment, and supervision of teachers in our primary education system.
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Nigerians who watched that drama on television – it has now gone viral on the internet – may erroneously think the absurdity was peculiar to the state. No; it is a national crisis, which demands decisive response. The springboard of this serio-comic was the massive discovery of teachers’ age falsification in which some of them claimed to have obtained their primary school certificates at between the ages of eight and nine. “We found that of all our primary school teachers, only 1,287, representing nine per cent, out of 14,484 teachers, had proper and accurate records in our system,” says Oshiomhole.
The teachers’ credentials audit may have unfurled worse cases, but what is most critical is how to redeem the system from its self-inflicted harm. An embarrassing and destructive issue such as this calls for a tough decision. The good of the society, achieved through training of the mind – the essence of education – is in danger. Therefore, we urge the state government to, not only sack the teachers found culpable in the certificate forgery and perjury scandal, but to also prosecute them. This is the only reasonable action to take in order to save the future.
We believe that Oshiomhole can demonstrate the political will needed to do this, the same way he acted when he signed the death warrants of condemned criminals, becoming the first governor to do so since 1999. As a matter of fact, timidity and sympathy should be alien to governance when the moral health of the society is being trifled with, by vile or unscrupulous elements.
In some states of the federation, the employment of primary school teachers is a big racket by well organised syndicates. Personnel of State Schools Management Boards are involved and we think this may have been the route through which this disgraceful coterie of teachers got their way into the system. It may also be that politicians, notorious for bending the rules, had a say in the recruitment of those teachers. As the governor wondered, can a teacher who is incapable of reading, write properly on the board? What the governor discovered ought to have been detected much earlier in a functional education system.
The Edo primary teachers’ scandal evokes the question of death of the Inspectorate Division in our education system. In the past, inspectors made unscheduled visits to schools for on-the-spot assessment of teachers’ performance in the classroom. Those found to be incompetent were removed from the system. Pedagogy is a knowledge-based endeavour that requires constant re-training of teachers to keep them abreast of changes in the field, and to be intellectually active through holiday courses. Given what is now publicly known of our school system, returning these time-tested practices that once underpinned quality education has become most desirable.
Edo State is not alone in this infamy. In February, the Kaduna State Commissioner for Education, Usman Mohammed, at an education summit, stated that 1,300 out of the 1,599 state teachers failed arithmetic and basic literacy tests. The 1,300 teachers scored below 25 per cent. Similarly, in Kwara State, 259 teachers, among them university graduates, flunked a test meant for primary four pupils in 2008; while 16,000 teachers in Ekiti State (primary and secondary), shunned a competence test that Governor Kayode Fayemi had set for them in June 2012.
The concern is: if this rot is so pervasive in states that cannot be adjudged to be educationally backward, the scenario in states that are educationally disadvantaged, where pupils scored two and four marks out of 200 in the last common entrance exam to gain admission to Unity Schools, could be imponderable. In Sokoto State, for instance, the rate of unqualified teachers is as high as 80 per cent, according to Ahmed Moddibo, a former Executive Secretary of the Universal Basic Education Commission.
Good teachers make a great difference to their students’ academic achievement. Attention must be turned from concern over having a sufficient number of teachers to having enough quality teachers. The pressing issue is how to improve quality. In its 2006 Education Policy Series, UNESCO suggested that all new teachers should participate in quality induction and mentoring programmes; make working environment in schools learning friendly for both the educators and students; reinvent professional development for teachers and ensure better pay for teachers who demonstrated knowledge and skills that contribute to improved student achievement. This is really the way to go.
Indeed, these grim realities also portend a dour horizon for the country in the near future. Ignoring them is an invitation to anarchy.
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