Abstract
The present state of the Nigeria education system brings worry to the hearts of all stakeholders because education goals such as producing skilled and professionally competent graduates, basic education for all, education for technological advancement, all to fulfil the dream of national development and prosperity, are yet farfetched from being a reality. Literatures were reviewed on three of the policies in education, which include: education funding, universal basic education and teachers’ education for better understanding. The review discussed and highlighted the problems, potholes and patches of these policies as examples of the reason why education development in Nigeria is yet at the bottom of the success ladder. Conclusions were reached and recommendations were proffered.
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
1.1 Background of the study
The importance of education has always been emphasized over the ages. For example, Cohn (2019) states that education is the single most important determinant of a person’s economic and social success. Cohn quotes some world-famous philosophers to support this assertion. According to Cohn, Plato had declared that, “the direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life”. Also Plato had affirmed that, “education is the best provision for old age” and that, “educated men are as much superior to uneducated men as the living is to the dead. Educational policies had always been wonderfully stated but imperfectly implemented and this singular reason has crumbled plans and made education in Nigeria a laughing stuck. Education has been an excellent tool to indeed bring about advancement and development in the nation as proven by advanced nations of the world (Osaghae & Irabor 2018). From observation, the nation still groups in the dark educationally. This has brought nothing more than distress for the education administrators/managers, planners and other stakeholders. The education planners have their wonderful ideas on paper but gigantic problems are encountered, when it comes to implementing these ideas, (Lenshie, 2013). How come Nigeria education system is still at the bottom of the success ladder? These questions were some of the worry of this study. For further understanding of this worry, three important Educational Policies which included: Educational Funding, Universal Basic Education (UBE), and Teacher Education have been critically examined. Primary education is the bedrock of the education. Essentially, it is broad based with emphasis on permanent and functional literacy and effective communication. It is the extensive education preparation for a larger number of occupations.
A number of laws have been passed and policy documents and reports produced in order to help meet Nigeria’s educational needs and aspirations since independence. A number of such initiatives are: The education Act of Free Universal Basic Education Act 2004. All the foregoing policies, laws and initiatives were geared towards improving the quality of education delivery in the country, (Federal Republic of Nigeria, 2014). One way of ensuring quality of education is to improve internal efficiency of education. Internal efficiency of education is an aspect of quality of education. The indicators of internal efficiency of education are used to measure the impact and performance of a particular type or level of education. Indicators of internal efficiency of the education system include such issues as pupil–teacher ratio, repetition rate, dropout rate, average attendance, examination passed rates, pupils cost of education, average instructional space (classroom per student) and adequate teaching and learning materials. Basic education as contained in the 2007 Education Reform launched by the president of the federal Republic of Nigeria in 2007 as reported in the Daily sun comprises kindergarten, primary and junior secondary school or junior high school (Charles, 2017). Federal Republic of Nigeria (2012) identified a number of factors that hampered quality basic education in Nigeria and they included: lack of infrastructure facilities; lack of equipment; inadequate instructional materials such as text books stationery, teaching/ learning materials and equipment; insufficient qualified teachers resulting in poor quality teaching and learning; high pupil − teacher ratio especially in rural and sub − urban areas; ineffective use of contact hours and mass promotion. The impact and performance of the education system on society do not always immediately seem obvious to people. It is therefore desirable to develop indicators which combine information on performance and impact in a condensed and qualitative form (Charles, 2017). Some of the indicators that could be useful to educational planning are: Indicators of population covered by educational services, indicators of internal efficiency of education, indicators of external efficiency of education and indicators of quality of educational opportunity.
The success of a reformed structure and content of education, in large measure, will depend on improving the quality of services at the basic level. This will influence the perceived attractiveness of school attendance as well as the learning achievement of students (Charles, 2017). The construction and rehabilitation of primary and junior secondary schools are some of the important ways of improving quality of basic education, but there is also the need to make equipment and textbooks available and to improve the quality of school infrastructure. There should be some conscious effort to lower the ratio of pupils to textbooks through increase production and distribution. There is the need for the government and all stakeholders in education to continue to explore various ways of improving the quality of basic education in Nigeria. One way of measuring the quality of basic education is to evaluate the indicators of internal efficiency which depends on not only teacher quantity but also teacher quality which is said to be the most important school related factor influencing students’ achievement (Jennifer, 2013)
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The problem of this study is that Nigeria seems not to be growing educationally but rather diminishing and this has affected every facets of life in Nigeria. In the face of transferred technology, Nigeria still remains technologically disadvantaged. In the 21st century, Nigeria faces greater measures of power failures. University graduates are incompetent and unskilled. When foreigners are always called in to seek out the technological problems such as: space programmes and the likes, a lot of illiterates that neither read nor write are all over the place even in the face of UBE, then something is definitely wrong somewhere. Educating Nigeria’s citizens is a great achievement that will help Nigeria move forward, help its citizens understand instructions, signs, and rudiments, implications of the way Nigeria has to be developed and help in bringing about her success. No other nation’s citizens can ever really care for Nigeria as Nigerians would care for Nigeria but “if we call our expensive cloth a rag, then others will use it as a cleaning cloth”. Our environment is still very disorganized, rough and disoriented because of inadequate knowledge about the implications in it, for the development of the nation. In all facets of life, one can see the handwriting of inadequate education culminating to failures of Education in Nigeria. Education as a process of imparting knowledge, skills, facts, skills and ideas, forms the basis for human capacity development (Lenshie, 2013). Education is perceived in this study to be the system motivating positive institutional changes and developments, moving towards creating the required internal solidarity, cohesion and integration of people to achieve the common good for all in the society. Education is also seen as not only school acquisition but also informal and non-formal acquisition of knowledge. Since 1999, Nigerian has witnessed an unequivocal increase in the number of educational institutions, following the private sector driven economy in Nigeria. Inspite of the increase, the standard of education continues to deteriorate, as the objectives for which they were established are yet to be fulfilled (Umoh, 2006). A lot of factors have been attributed to the reasons why education is at the verge of total collapse. The reasons include: Inadequate facilities to cope with the increase in school establishment and students’ population explosion, (Obielumani, 2016) poor policy making process (Ihonvbere, 2016), poor financing (Aghenta, 2018), poor implementation of policies and programmes (Babalola, 2011), ethnicity, religion and god fatherism (Lenshie, 2013). These are just excuses for all stakeholders’ failures, inadequacies, inefficiency and ineffectiveness. Politics and corruption in Education has also been said to have contributed immensely to the downward trend of Education in Nigeria (Lenshie, 2013), Inconsistencies ineducational Policies is seen as a result of the game of politics that the so called “elected officials” play. This consequently affects the lives of the people negatively. This study perused the aforementioned policies to critically examine how politics ruined the beautiful ideas behind them.
1.3 OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY
The study has one main objective which is sub-divided into general and specific objectives; the general objective is to examine the internal efficiency and achievement of basic education goals. The specific objectives are;
- To examine the role of education management on the attainment basic education goal
- To explore the relationship between education management and policy implementation
- To examine the role of internal efficiency on the achievement of universal basic education goals in Kokona LGA of Nasarawa state
- To proffer suggested solutions to the identified problem
