Education Should Be A Test Of Knowledge And Not a do Or Die Affair.

Education is supposed to be a test of knowledge and not a do or die affair, but in the case of Nigeria, the reverse is the case.

What is education?

According to the dictionary, education can simply be defined as the act or process of imparting knowledge, judgement, and a level of intellectual maturity. It is also the act or process of imparting or acquiring particular knowledge or skills, as for a profession. It is the result produced by instruction, training or study.

Education in Nigeria in recent years and now has not shown its usefulness, as it has now become an arena to exploit youths and their parents. Students are not being encouraged anymore because the educational set up in Nigeria is nothing to write home about.

Before the advent of JAMB, individual universities admitted their students mainly through GCE A/LEVEL or Higher school Certificate (HSC). It is a known fact that “JAMB came into existence because of agitation from the north that the admission process at that time was not favourable to the region,” a keen observer of the nation’s educational development recalled.

Even if JAMB was established by law, the Post-UTME was not established by any binding law what so ever. Post-UTME owed its existence to the concept of “quality assurance” propagated during the regime of former President Olusegun Obasanjo that most university students are of poor academic background and so likely to drop out before completing the degree programme. They will come in with exceedingly high JAMB scores of between 280 and 300, but cannot write or speak correct English after graduation.

Are students to blame or the government? This poses a serious question, and an accurate answer is required.

A tree falls from the top and not the bottom is a general saying. The Nigeria government should be blamed for the sad issues in the educational sector of Nigeria.

First and foremost, most students sitting for this examination called JAMB are apprehended one way or the other for cheating in the examination hall, why does this continue year in year out? Is it that the students tends to be smarter than the government or the fact that the government is lazy to adequately disperse it’s duty of conducting such examination in a free and fair manner.

Students are caught with phones in the examination hall, yet they are been searched before they get into such hall. What does this tell you? After all, the phones were not invincible during the search. It is actually clear that the so called securities put in place during such exam are corrupt and not professionals. Most of them tend to collect bribe and just pretend at the security check.

Yet things have not changed for better. Corruption, fraud, bribery, favouritism, nepotism, sectionalism, exam malpractice have combined to make mockery of both JAMB and Post-UTME. They are believed to be money-spinning ventures for tertiary institutions.

Because of scarcity of admission spaces, placements in universities had become “a-cash-and-carry exercise” for the highest bidders. The number of people who can’t get admission after JAMB keeps increasing every year, building an army of frustrated, hopeless youths easily lured into criminality and anti-social behaviour.

Why does JAMB conduct examination for over a million or more student without adequate space to accommodate such students? Let’s take a scenario where everybody who sat for JAMB passed as expected, after writing the Post-UTME, they also passed. What happens in this situation? Would some be asked to go home for lack of space or what? The Nigeria government should learn to forecast the future, and place education as one of the priority in this country instead of getting fat on six figure salaries.

In a country like China for instance, their citizens are motivated in one way or another to be creative. That’s why you find out that most things that they make use of in their country are locally produced. It is a sad situation in Nigeria because even spoons are been imported into the country. That’s why you find reduced innovational personalities in a country such as Nigeria because we do not encourage local made good, we do not encourage our youths. We tend to depend on imported goods which is a very wrong step in the development of a country. Nigeria cannot boast of making ordinary calculator, let alone a computer system.

The government should try and look into the educational sector of Nigeria by increasing the budget allocated to education, provide more tertiary institutions for its citizen, motivate youths to be productive, and also give student’s scholarship to acquire more knowledge and improve the Nigerian economy.

If you ask an average Nigerian undergraduate what his/her plans are for the future, the response would be: I want to work in an oil company or I want to work in a bank and so on. This shouldn’t be, we should learn to be productive and not working for others. Education should not be a do or die affair, but a test of knowledge.