There is intellectual recession in Nigeria. It is high time we conducted
an intellectual audit of tutors in our higher institutions of learning. Is it
refutable, as someone recently argued, that ‘half-baked’ graduates are
produced by ‘half-baked’ lecturers; that a mango seed can only
produce a mango fruit, certainly not an orange? When you have a
system where a lecturer appears at the beginning of a semester, dumps
the scheme of work or course outline on the class and reappears about
a week or two to the semester examination to give ‘areas of
concentration’ to the students or allow cash and sex to determine their
grades, then you are bound to have ‘half-baked’ graduates.
Should the practice of intellectual tyranny – where the teacher plays
God or determines who should or should not graduate – continue or
should the students themselves be involved in the assessment of their
lecturers, as it is the case abroad and in some private institutions in
Nigeria? How do we end the current intellectual sterility and circle of
substandard learning, even when the limited funds deployed to these
institutions and their internally generated revenues (IGRs) are generally
mismanaged? What salary structure is appropriate for our academics
so that we can end the yearly ritual of going on strike for months and
then coming back to collect salaries for the period of the industrial
action? Should the government, in the Nigerian context, continue to
superintend public tertiary institutions of learning or should we turn
them over to private hands in order to extirpate these endemic and
systemic cultures?
Is it time we converted the polytechnics to universities, like Britain did?
Since the majority of those who go to polytechnics are as good as their
counterparts in the universities, should we convert all polytechnics to
universities or turn them to satellites of contiguous universities in order
to accommodate majority of our teeming youths seeking varsity
education every year? And how much destruction has the take-over of
public schools in the 1970s by governments done to our educational
system?
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| FILE PHOTO: Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka smiles during a lecture to celebrate his 80th birthday in Abeokuta on July 11, 2014. AFP PHOTO |
The Sunday Post of October 29, 1967 carried a press release by
Anthony Enahoro, the Federal Commissioner for Information,
announcing the detention of Soyinka by the Federal Military
Government. The very first paragraph of that release is intriguing: “A
famous Nigerian playwright, Head of Drama and Lecturer in English of
the Lagos University, Mr Wole Soyinka, has been detained…”
What exactly made a lecturer with seven or nine years of experience famous? How could a man with only a bachelor’s degree become the Head of Department of English, Head of Drama, in less than seven years of taking up a university appointment? I believe the answer would be located, mostly, in the fact that Soyinka is both a teacher and practitioner – or is more of a practitioner than a teacher, to underscore the point here. Even as a fresh graduate, his play, ‘The Invention’, was premiered at Royal Court Theatre, London, where he worked for two
years before returning to Nigeria. While in school, his presentation on
‘Tipping’ won an oratory contest. He told stories on BBC and staged a
play at the Students’ Drama Festival – all a rare feat for a Nigerian at
that time.
The way a theatre practitioner will impart knowledge to students will be
different from the way a mere teacher of theatre will do. In the same
way, a practising lawyer will affect the students better than a mere
textbook teacher of law. A civil engineer with many years of field
experience will achieve better results with his wards than a classroom
civil engineer. What we have in our tertiary schools are essentially
classroom teachers, not practitioners. No matter how good you are as
a professor of mass communication, a ‘media practitioner’ of the same
number of years or less, who can also teach, will affect the students far
better than you do. Sure, a practising agriculture lecturer will know so
much through experience and achieve far better results with learners
than a textbook lecturer.
Yes, I’m aware of the industrial attachment scheme for students,
sabbatical for lecturers, etc.; these are not enough to produce well-
rounded graduates, especially in this age. So what is the kernel of the
argument here?
Archetypal lecturer
I know a few lecturers who are practitioners of what they teach (despite
the limitation of time). They attest to the huge impact of the practical
experience on their fields of study, and consequently, on their charges.
What we need on our campuses now are more of trainers than
classroom teachers. There is need to make our education functional –
a tool for national development. Our academics should no longer live in
ivory towers. The essence of knowledge is its use to advance human
cause. Knowledge that has no utilitarian application outside the school
system is of no value. In the context of the marriage between the
‘Town’ and the ‘Gown’, Soyinka is the archetypal lecturer needed for our
tertiary education. What a huge impact have his works, in print and on
stage, made on our society. Prof. Barth Nnaji is on the same pedestal
with Soyinka in this regard. His theoretical as well as practical works in
the field of power speak volumes.
While encouraging our dons to practice, there is need to draw teachers
(instructors or trainers) from outside the college or school system and
evolve a system where students will have 35 per cent of their classes
(scheme of work) with the practitioners, who have the ability to teach,
while teachers within the school system retain 65 per cent contact. In
other words, the practitioners will be employed to teach on a part-time
basis while the school teachers are, of course, on full-time. This
should constitute a major concept of the marriage between the ‘Town’
and the ‘Gown’.
I observe this in the academic community in Nigeria. Rather than ask
about your work, the question is usually, “What did you study?” It is
always about certificate, not necessarily what you can do or your track
record. If Bill Gates had applied to teach a course in Computer Studies
in any tertiary institution in Nigeria, he would have been asked how
many degrees he secured in Computer Studies!
The rule, of course, is that you must teach what you studied in the
college. But there are always exceptions. The academic community in
Nigeria is closed and stuck in a time warp. This is to its own
disadvantage. Imagine a hypothetical case of a Chuka Momah being
turned down from taking a course in journalism or physical education
just because he studied microbiology! The two books unveiled in 2014
by Momah, according to Anthony Akaeze, “have been hailed by many
critics as invaluable works that sportsmen, sport education
instructors… will find useful because of their richness and the diversity
of subjects treated” (TELL, April 21, 2014) C’don Adinuba, by virtue of the depth and breadth of his public offerings, has no business being completely outside the academic milieu. Students under the tutelage of his likes in journalism, political science, English studies, etc. cannot but come out as well-grounded graduates. C’don had to abandon his post-graduate studies because he was not getting any value for the time and money. If he were to apply today for a teaching appointment, he would be asked if he had a
Ph.D, yet he ought to be training Ph.D students! Thank God our erudite scholar, the trainer of trainers and teacher of teachers, Prof. Soyinka, neither has an MA nor a Ph.D! I am here putting convention on trial. I expect witnesses just as I anticipate a robust defence.
Academic dead-woodsYes, government must take the ultimate responsibility for the recession but everything is not about government. Prof. Babatunde Munir Ogunsanwo once spoke about “academic ‘dead-woods’ who remain in the system for decades without self-improvement” and those who indulge in attending to their lectures “a week or two before the commencement of an examination.” Prof. Ogunsanwo spoke then in
2009 during his inaugural lecture at the Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU), Ago-Iwoye. With the reforms and innovations going on now at OOU, which have resulted in the institution emerging the best state university in Nigeria within a short space of three years (2012 – 2015), perhaps the solution to revamping our educational system does not necessarily lie in turning them over to private hands. These reforms should now spread to other public higher institutions in Nigeria. The President, state governors and other stakeholders in the education sector must insist on cast-iron discipline and accountability on our campuses. There must be efficiency and excellence. A system should also be put in place to distinguish and reward the academics and support staff that labour day and night to nurture a great future for Nigeria.
These are among the issues that should engage our attention as we celebrate our literary icon, the teacher and trainer, my intellectual avatar, Wole Soyinka, now in the early evening of his life…!
Posted by Adebayo A J
