IBADAN – To reposition the education industry, Mr. Olu Abiala, a former secretary of the Nigerian Union of Teachers (NUT), has advocated for an integrated educational system.
Abiala stated that the approach will guarantee the integration of affective, cognitive, and psychomotor components of schooling.
He believes that the integration will have a significant positive impact on Nigeria’s overall development.
“We are talking about the 6-3-3-4 in which the first six years were expected to develop the literacy ability of the pupils.
“At the end of the 6 years, the educational policy says anyone who passed through the six years must have been permanently literate.
“The third year is to give the students the choice to choose between pursuing intellectualism or vocational development.
“But where is that aspect of vocational development in our current practice of educational system?
“We must believe in education and an integrated one that believes both in the affective, cognitive and psychomotor aspects of education. Without these three, we are going nowhere,” Abiala said.
He described the nation’s education as a reflection of the value placed on it by the society as regards global technological, intellectual, moral, and ethical development.
“What we need in Nigeria today is a regenerated national and political leadership, who espouses value, continuity, growth as well as contemporary development in the world.
“We need to bring educational philosophy and policies into play, not by what they script in paper but by what they demonstrate practically,” Abiala said.
On modern infrastructure, Abiala asked, “How many schools today have such gadgets that impact the current information technology to convey teaching and learning?”
He, therefore, urged the government to rank education as highly important and to ensure that those selected to run its affairs were individuals with convictions to turn the sector around positively.
“But sincerely, some of them belong to the class of my colleague, who, when the government said it had budgeted the lion’s share of the national budget for education, kicked against it.
“This is because the lion will never allow its share of the budget to be given to education. Give whatever education deserves to education; don’t give the lion’s share to education.
“The lion’s share has always gone into the bowels of lions and who are the lions but the political elites,” he said.