The Edo State Comatose Educational System and Intervention

The Edo State Comatose Educational System and Intervention

By Elempe Dele

According to a friend who followed Bar. Olumide Akpata around during campaigns in Akoko-Edo, said they went to a village where the king begged Akpata to help him build a school in his community if he is elected the governor of the state. The narrator said the king said they do not need water, road or any of these basic amenities, but just a school where their children can be educated. The king said their children, from clusters of about three villages, have to trek several kilometers to access the nearest school to them. He added that the school have about three government teachers from JSS1 to SS3.

I could not independently verify this story, but from my own experience in Akoko-Edo, the story have beams of reality: Public education in Edo State is facing acute existential threat – something urgent must be done to engineer quick recovery or else they should all be closed down or bequeathed to interested private individuals to run.

For me, this sorry state of education tragic. I went to a public school in my formative years. St. Paul’s Anglican Grammar School was where I studied from the 80s to the early 90s. We had classes A to F and some of the subject like English Language and Mathematics had several specialized teachers. The teacher who will take us Summary will be different from that which will take us Comprehension. That was how so many subjects were. The staff room was loaded with teachers. My father, a very sound public school administrator, was our principal. Now in his early 90s cannot believe public education has gone to the wilds.

The next governor has a lot of work to do and he should start from the basics – there should be no room for manifestations of pretenses, duplicity, sham, falsification, fabrication, artifice… He needs to start with the immediate employment of quality teachers. Renovate existing schools to standard where humans can learn and build structures within school premises that can give comfort to students and teachets like toilets, sleeping bays or and dispensaries. Provide materials and facilities for learning such as desks and science laboratories. Build new schools in remote rural areas and build advance schools to train teachers, give incentives to teachers, among others.

The decadence in education experienced in the past years must not continue, it must be discouraged. No amount of whims and caprices concerning the sorry state of our public educational system that have been the pastimes of contemporary governors should be encouraged. Public schools in Edo State are mere breeding grounds for illiterates because there are no teachers to take students through lessons. This is a fact that must first be accepted – any of the numerous fanciful veil to be cloud this fact should be discarded.

Some few schools within the urban areas like Benin City are flash-points for optics, it is not so in rural areas where there are basically one to three teachers in a whole secondary school.

The next governor must do away with highfalutin propaganda that is meant to twist and turn unsuspecting collaborators. He must sit with critical stakeholders to mourn the dying system and then discuss the future of our children who cannot afford private schools. They must have options of attending quality public schools as we had after independence to about 1993 or so before public education continued to slide into a near death situation.

I see the school in my community and use it as an example of the public education decline, decay, deterioration, dissolution, degeneration and debasement. And funny enough, those who are responsible for this, those who superintend this declension are products from well managed public schools in the 70s and 80s. They were beneficiaries of public schools with quality teachers, well stocked science laboratories, clean school environments, up to par classrooms, safe and secure environments. Today, they have abandoned the enterprise of the old where the management of children in schools were top priorities. It was then a badge of honour to raise as much as possible excellent students that will go on to study medicine, engineering, architecture, law, and other satisfactory courses. Today, it will be a matter of hopelessness for any student from these invalid schools to dream of going beyond SSS3. They just want to have the certificates so that they can go on to learn a trade: mechanic, hair dressing, carpentry and others that forced illiteracy can afford. They have no dreams beyond these.

So the next governor must declare a state of emergency on public education, just as he must do to sectors like health and agriculture. The task must be atruistic – that disassociation from self-glorification and pontification of reforms and policies that are not translatory to physical improvement of the sector. There must be visceral conviction that this can be achieved within some years if focused attention is paid to the quick recovery of the dying system of education in the state that meaninglessly started some three decades ago.