Tuesday, July 12, 2016

IT CAN ONLY BE EDUCATION

The Yoruba proverb has established that the child that is not trained will sell the family’s heritage. This is supported by all religions and traditions. I conceptualise the family here as a nation or country. Any country that takes for granted the EDUCATION of her citizens will not have peace. Now you are bothered by the pipeline destructions. Now you want to arrest all hawkers in Lagos. Now you want to ban okadas on highways because its casualties dominate the emergency wards.
Dear Government of Nigeria, there is only one thing that is best to do now: solidify education!
Vocational education is evidently collapsed and schools are now overcrowded. Twenty thousand students apply to schools that can at best admit seven thousand students. Great tailors, painters, hair stylists, mechanics, vulcanizers are busy writing UTME. 

You now have a generation of young people who want to study Accounting but detest Account and Mathematics, the consequence of poor or lack of counseling in schools. Do students still meet with counselors before proceeding to SS1? I doubt. Build refineries, construct roads, fix power, do them all. If you don’t revisit the messy state of education in Nigeria: WE GO NOWHERE!
I will end this public essay with the words of a great educationist, Tai Solarin:
A man without education, and a rich measure of it, is hardly any more useful than a palm tree that grows wild in the bush. In fact, he could be less useful. For he would have all the propensities for a parasitic existence, whereas a palm tree does not take any more from the land where the roots are established.
Those developed countries have more than good roads and lights; they have sane and sound minds.
Let it be on record that today, I speak, like those great ones of yesterday spoke.
God bless Nigeria!
(c) 2016 Bamgbose Ganiu

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