THE HEARTACHE OF EDUCATION IN NIGERIA
My ears must have been deceiving me. What did I just hear the lecturer say?
We were having BCH 203 class and the lecturer was explaining metabolism as touching the area of digestion in the human body. I was elated to hear the topic as it was more inclined towards biology than it was to chemistry. I had taken my jotter from my bag, positioned in a very receptive posture and fixed my eyes on the lecturer only to hear the lecturer after giving a brief introduction say to us that,
"This topic is simple, you have been taught digestion in your secondary school".
I was dumbfounded, "was he so lazy that he could not come up with a better excuse to not teach that topic?"
Or he didn't realize not all of us were jambites, some of us had stayed at home without admission for some years so, "How on earth are we supposed to recall all that we were taught in secondary school as regards the very broad topic of digestion?".
A challenge we're often faced with as students in Nigeria. I could remember vividly when my Biology teacher thought on this same topic whilst I was in secondary school. He said,"Don't worry, when you get to the university, you'll be taught more about this" and here I am in the university and my lecturer is saying I should have been taught in secondary school.
I ended up not being taught at all in secondary school or in the university. This is just one of the things students have to face due to the incompetence of their teachers/lecturers.
The conduct of men and women who now occupy teaching and lecturing positions is literally decaying.
They are too lazy to teach as they ought (note that is not referring to all but most as there exist some good eggs amongst the bad), they receive bribes to add marks and upgrade results even the secondary schools have expos being sent to them for external exams and the educational system of the country keeps deteriorating as the years pass by.
And the blame for the diminishing state of the nation's educational system is not to be upon the lecturers and teachers alone but the students take responsibility for this predicament.
Though the larger part is placed on the lecturers as their attitudes towards students depicts that they just want to punish the students.
A survey carried out on students in the university about the state of heart of their lecturers towards them showed that most students believe their lecturers don't want them to graduate or at least not with a first class. It seems to be a thing of pride before some lecturers that their departments have not produced a first class graduate in years and they struggle to frustrate students to keep it that way.
They also stated the use of outrageous and minute faults by lecturers to fail students as you'd hear stuffs like,
"Because of a person who's phone rang in class I will no longer lecture on this topic, see you in the exam hall". As much as it's ethically wrong for a Student's phone to ring in class, that's not enough reason to deliver such punishments to them.
The issues that need to be resolved in the Educational system of the country as regards conduct are many and no write up can possibly contain all of it but it is expedient we have a change of heart towards our educational system whether as students or lecturers to make our Nation's Future bright.
