NECO confirmed 90% failure in the NECO Exams...With the latest headlines on national television and in national dailies, I believe its time that our government take this matter extremely SERIOUS.
What is the problem? Why do we record low scores in national examinations every year?Where are these 10% that have passed NECO? Are they in private secondary schools? If there are outstanding students in the public secondary schools, what are they doing right?
We cannot afford to ignore the EDUCATION sector in Nigeria. We need to take urgent steps to reform our policies, introduce new teaching methodologies, engage teachers in training programmes and revise that obsolete curricula.
Most CSR's are focused on providing infrastructures such as donating blocks of classrooms, signposts, re-painting the building, providing some instructional materials. Typically, the public secondary school in Nigeria is poorly funded and are in total state of collapse. Students have no books, furniture, water, sick bay how much more a decent library. While some research supports conducive learning environment as a tool to increased class participation and improved academic performance, we(not government because we are the government) need to do more than provide furniture or infrastructure to the kids.
It appears that lack of conducive learning environment is not the only negatively contributing factor to poor academic performance. Child labour and misplaced priorities have been identified as personal and internal factors for poor performance. Most Lagos traffic hawkers are children, young adult that should spend after school hours studying or doing home work making a living for the family. High level of poverty, high cost of living, have made life unbearable for the average Nigerian, thus, every family member is out on the streets for their daily bread. Even for those that are working to support their families spend their time reading, playing videos games or other forms of entertainment.
We might want to consider teacher's commitment and dedication and attitude to work. Often teachers send notes to the class and ask students to just read for exams.They spend their time in the staff room ignoring their core responsibility. We need TEACHER FIRE to train these kids.
Proper time management, adequate instructional materials, conducive learning environment, dedicated teachers and revised curricula are likely perfect combinations which might turn over poor performance in national examinations.
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