Age of awareness

In the typical Nigerian school, students are fed information at a speed that frankly only a computer can read and comprehend fully. This is done over the course of 12 years (Primary and secondary school). Naturally, most students if not all were and are still forced to adopt the art of cramming where students read and stored just enough information to pass the class. Once the course was done, there was nothing retained and students moved on gallantly to the next course. I think of it as downloading the contents of a flash drive and deleting it thereafter. It is very typical that a Nigerian student, after spending all day in school most likely goes home to a waiting extra lesson teacher ready to continue the “good” work started by the teachers in school. It’s not that it is bad to have extra lessons but the mode of teaching and the inherent inability to enhance the students’ problem solving skills is worrisome. This form of teaching and learning transcends all age groups and some Nigerians tend to carry this mode of learning into their first year of college or unfortunately maybe even beyond college. Consequently, I honestly went through secondary school and college cramming most things and did not really take the time to comprehend a lot what was being taught to me; I burned the midnight oil for years to enhance my exam day regurgitation skills and it wasn’t until grad school that I actually began to re-evaluate the way I read things. I began to think critically about what I was learning and started questioning more, which at first was exhausting but it helped foster interesting conversations between me and my class mates and opened my mind to new possibilities. We need to start challenging this African mentality of pushing children — young children especially into cramming information and constantly studying only to remember the information for the exam day especially because extensive research has shown that play is the most important thing in a Child’s formative years where they can learn problem solving, interaction with other children, and how to spot hidden things etc. The danger in our current way of teaching is that we raise individuals with the inability to think about things critically, to think outside the box, to believe that the solution will always be in an already created textbook. Unfortunately, I still meet a lot of Nigerians who have yet to realize that this is an issue — they study intensely for courses only to pass but are unable to have an intellectual discussion on what the class meant to them, its theories, their understanding and perhaps objections to the said theories. This is the reason why a junior consultant at a firm in Lagos is told “this is how we have been doing this” and is either afraid to respectfully question the methods and challenge the authority or think about a better way of solving the issue. The issue of oppression by authoritative figures in Nigeria is a completely different issue entirely that I will attempt to discuss later. This could also be part of the reason why Nigerian youths are seemingly gullible that a political leader is as honest as they appear to be. We are unable to identify the faults no matter how seemingly obvious they are, we brand news articles exposé as fake and a political attempt to soil the name of the said politician. A good example is the recent gubernatorial election in the state of Ekiti in the south western part of Nigeria where some youths (either motivated by money or otherwise) were seen singing the praises of the incumbent governor as though they did not see the issues he had created over the course of his term and how it has adversely affected their lives. These faults are the characteristics of a person who is unable to think about things critically and is therefore unable to challenge information that is being fed to them. The issue is also apparent with our political leaders, a lot of them talk about issues plaguing Nigerians from a myopic point of view, it is almost as though they are unable to break the problem down to a level that will help them understand specially how it affects the average Nigerian.