National President of Methodist College, Uzuakoli Old Boys Association, and Special Adviser on Monitoring and Evaluation to the governor of Abia State, Ugochukwu Okoroafor, has insisted that there is the urgent need to align education in the South-East with modern day realities and technology now ruling the world in order to improve the quality of education in the region.
Okoroafor made the call on Tuesday in Umuahia, while expressing worry over the degrading education quality in the South-East region of Nigeria.
Assessing the sector in the South-East geo-political zone generally, Okoroafor said, “Education has always been the mainstay of the South-East society. This is because, we believe so much in education. “Considering that secondary education came in in 1923, just a 100 years ago, everybody has testified that we take education seriously in the South-East because of the number of institutions that we have and the areas where our sons and daughters have excelled.
“So, it is very clear that education is a major industry in the South-East and right now, from that simple initiative in 1923, we have hundreds, if not thousands of schools all over the place, all of them producing great men and women, who are serving the society. It has helped this region meeting its challenges.
“I don’t think that we have been able to respond rapidly to the ravages of the 1967 war, since we do not have the quality of manpower that these schools have produced. You saw how we were able to bounce back in spite of all the devastations in the war. Since then, we have been able to sustain development, to keep pace with the rest of the world, because of the quality of education that we have.”
Identifying the problems facing education in the zone, he said, “Of course, there too many challenges. The most important challenge is that we now have education that is not aligned with the needs of the society. We have education that is totally at variance with what it ought to be. This is because, employability is important, the development of the individual, the character, the skill, the knowledge, these are all things that we need to happen.
“Unfortunately, we have drifted away to the point where people finish their education and are not employable. They are not useful to themselves, they are not useful to the society. You see so many people parading certificates, but you cannot even employ them because they don’t have the prerequisite skills and they don’t have the right mentality. The kind of education we had at Uzuakoli encourages discipline, integrity, honesty, truthfulness and hard work.
“You can see how it helped the society. No student of Uzuakoli has been indicted for any misdemeanor in the history of the college, in spite of their pervading presence in the military, finance, politics, law, medicine, sciences, engineering and all. So it is a testimony to the fact that the quality of education that we had has been most effective and aligned to the needs of the society.
“At least, seven members of Dr. Alex Otti’s team schooled at Methodist College, Uzuakoli. This also tells you the quality of manpower that the school has produced.”
He also identified the causes of the challenges that has eroded education in the region, stating, “There are so many reasons. We live in a society that there is a quest for money, and certificate, as opposed to the quest for the development of each individual. So, we see so many people, who are not interested in going through the rigours of education and manpower development, but they just want the result.
There is also the problem of funding, and the low regard which the society has for teaching and education itself; and then people see the easy way out and they take it.
“One other problems we have is that our value system has denigrated education to the extent that people don’t really have much regard for education. In the old, teachers were very much respected, but these days, they don’t even have money to look after themselves, they don’t have houses, unlike in the past when they all used to live within the school compound and what they had was enough to look after them, even though their incomes were modest.
“All these things have disappeared and we don’t pay attention to them. The teacher was your father outside your home and whatever he or she did was right. However these days, people don’t have respect for them. So, these are part of the problem. Emphasis has been on the wrong quality of education. Putting heavy emphasis on liberal arts in a society that requires entrepreneurship skills, science, technology, engineering and mathematics will not work.
“We just need to be re-orientated and to reinvest our educational curriculum and the way education relate to our people. There is no teaching of Civics the way we used to learn it, there is no teaching of History and for more than 30 years, it was not taught in the schools. These were the things that enable us have a sense of where we were coming from and where we were supposed to be heading to. Civics made us become more responsible.