HISTORY OF NIGERIA EDUCATION SYSTEM----PART 2

How things stand today

Things have really changed today. It is now on record that up to 78% of men in Nigeria are educated in the western way and that up to 64% of women have received western education. The result was arrived at based on the level of English literacy obtainable in Nigeria. The percentages do not mean all those people have received university education; it only means that they had passed through one form of western education institution or the other.

It must also be stated that this statistics is based on results obtained mainly from the southern part of Nigeria; many of the northern states in Nigeria are still hell-bent on Islamic education alone and some of them still see western education as haram.

Be it Islamic or western education, Nigerians are educated one way or the other. It can therefore be said that Nigeria is a nation filled with the educated.

Only two higher institutions were present in Nigeria as at the time Nigerian got her independence from Great Britain. These higher institutions were Yaba Higher College and University College, Ibadan. Yaba Higher College was founded in 1934 and University College, Ibadan was founded in 1948. Later, Yaba Higher College had its name changed to Yaba College of Technology, while the name of University College, Ibadan was changed to University of Ibadan.

Several years after Nigeria’s independence, several other universities were formed and some of them are University of Lagos; Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria; Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife; and University of Nigeria, Nsukka. University of Benin was founded in 1970.  Federal universities were founded in other parts of the country at a later date, and this was how cities, like Maiduguri, Sokoto, Port Harcourt, Jos, Ilorin and Calabar got federal Universities around the 1980s.

At a later date, the government established institutions of agriculture and polytechnics across Nigeria in cities like Kaduna and Lagos.

As at 1980, it was recorded that up to 12 million Nigerian students were enrolled in primary schools. Up to 1.2 million children were enrolled in secondary school in that year also.  Furthermore, teachers training colleges had up to 240,000 students on enrolment.  Up to 75,000 students had gained admission into universities as at that year.  These numbers do not include those Nigerians that gained admission into foreign universities.
The decay of today

Yes, Nigeria had it good in times past. We started very well on the path to educational liberation, but it is unfortunate that education state in Nigeria as at present is nothing to write home about. There is great decline in education system and values in Nigeria today and many university graduates are unfortunately unemployable since many of them are half-baked graduates.
What is the way forward?

No one can actually say. The government has lots of work to do and the teachers too need to be proactive. Another factor that seems to be drawing education backward in Nigeria is the poor quality of teachers being produced today.  Nigeria really has a long way to go if the country is to get better educationally.