Usama Abdullah
Following the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board’s (JAMB) announcement of this year’s cut-off mark for joining Nigerian public universities, many people have taken to various media to poke fun at the board as well as disparage the entire country for the continued decay in its education sector.
Obviously, what informed the board to reduce the cut-off mark to a minimum of 140 is the terrible performance of the students in the University and Tertiary Education Matriculation Examination this year.
Even though the reduction calls for sympathy for the nation, those commentators have gotten it wrong by deriding the board and gloating over the students’ poor performance.
We cannot get it right when we only decide to laugh off this dysfunctional system. We are clearly, experiencing the outcome of an embarrassing failure in our education sector, and this will take us a long time before recovering.
Some people believe that students nowadays don’t read hard. And that they usually “cheat” their way to tertiary institutions. This could be true to a certain extent, and I agree with them. However, I also agree that the teachers are also quite blameworthy.
It would be a grave injustice to attribute the failures of the students to their teachers. But there’s a point we all must consider before leaping to conclude that the blame lies with the students alone.
Like I have said earlier, students may have been faring below the expectations of their parents and teachers today, thanks to the advent of TikTok, Snapchat, and Facebook Reel, among other online and offline distractions.
Yet the parents and teachers are partly the causes of such poor performances. The reason is that some teachers don’t deserve to teach because they are either not properly trained or unfit for the teaching profession.
Many of them lack teaching methods. While some of them just got themselves into the profession accidentally. You often hear of accidental teachers; we happen to be in large number at our public and some private schools.
No thanks to our politicians who have fouled up the recruitment system. This kind of teachers don’t teach to transform the students, but to get the chicken feed they usually take home as salaries.
When you go to those schools in which those unqualified teachers work, you will find them wearing fancy clothes and flaunting expensive phones in front of their students, and that nonchalance promotes unlawful student-teacher relationships.
Unknowingly, such a prodigal and nasty attitude help compromise the young impressionable students. The problem associated with this is that the students would be seen emulating what they saw those teachers doing. Within the blink of an eye, the students would be wild and tough to tame.
On the other hand, many parents seem to exhibit a kind of devil-may-care attitude toward the upbringing of their children.
They mollycoddle their children to the extent that they begin to forgive and forget all that the children do, be it good or bad.
Well, this type of parental neglect is another major cause of the backwardness of the children at school and in society. Because when they get home, the parents won’t care to ask them about their studies, nor find out how they’re really performing.
When some parents are invited to PTA meetings to discuss important things and chart the way out to help improve their children’s educational standards, they barely attend or give out frivolous excuses for their irresponsibility.
These are the things parents need to correct in order to prevent their children from descending so low or getting petty scores in their results.
In the same vein, the government too contribute hugely to the retrogradation of our education sector. It’s sad and painful that we’re cruelly ruled by people who are apparently unconcerned about what has become of the nation.
The leaders are only good at forcing half-baked policies on the regular citizens, which will only favour them and their families.
Looking at the precarious state of our public educational institutions and the prolonged but unresolved ASUU-FG debacle, you will understand that the government is doing nothing to refine our rotten education sector.
Instead of making noise or taunting the students for their low performances, we should assist in our own little ways and hope for the best.
Usama Abdullahi writes from Abuja. He can be reached at usamagayyi@gmail.com.
If students are blameworthy, so are teachers and parents
Cogently quite noteworthy writes-up.
Those incumbent politics and those who have plenary power in to the ”FG”, they had been more interested for themself than in our own advancement, although we shouldn’t lay all the blame on to the FG. The students and their parents, have their own contributory to the problem.
The Education Sector situation was further exacerbated in Nigeria.
It would be a grave injustice to attribute the failures of the students to their teachers. I like the phrase.