Public schools, we all know, have already been sinking
deeper and deeper behind Stone Age standard. Nobody is doing anything really
about the situation. Not even free education, which, in some ways, backfires.
Every year, like this time around, I voluntarily teach at
a secondary school in my neighborhood while on vacation. I am not there for
money. I am there for certain reasons, deep seated sympathy for the kids. I am there
to put in little contribution realizing the kids’ peers around the world are on
the verge of going out of the 21st century. But that is not the
problems when you look around and discover the majority of the continent is yet
to arrive at the 21st century in the 21st century, living
in a benighted world.
On second thought, I feel compelled to go to this school
because I see that here in Kano
there are kids schooling in high-end training environments. I want these poor
kids to catch up with those African peers, or at least, to have some competitive
training with students in Yandutse, Intercontinental, Kano Capital, St Louis and St Thomas
etc.
I want to prepare them to have shaky foundation instead
of the zero foundation they currently have. As secondary school kids, I want
them to be like us when you were in Primary One. Like us, to be able to read
Hausa texts and some kindergarten English phrases and sentences. To be able to
read and write letters and understand simple arithmetic.
Poor kids meet with a condition that ensures their total
alienation from the ability to do what some of us did when we were in primary
school while they were in secondary school. Thanks to free education.
Free education is good but is rife with atavistic deception
and duping. It offers a cover with which officials use to shirk their real
responsibility. The biggest problem is the sticking to the system when policy
makers really know the initiative cannot be presently sustained.
In the school where I teach, the condition is Hepatitis A
before it will slowly transform into B and C. When you compare the school with
other public schools across the state, the school should be grateful. Only two
set of classes are run in the afternoon where other schools divide the six
classes three by three between morning and afternoon. Without telling, the
situation comes from inadequate classrooms.
The school admits only sixty students per class instead
of the one hundred and twenty plus students packed in a single roof. They have
four computers, the envy of many schools.
The school management used to collect money from parents
to fix broken desks between terms interval, buy few Mathematics and English
texts books.
With this few resources, we want to groom these children.
To prevent the situation from escalating to Hepatitis B
and C, I extended invitations to some of my friends to join me whenever they
come on holiday. One is a final year student from the Department of Computer
Science Usman Danfodio University, the second is from Pharmacy Department and
the third from Political Science, both final year students of Ahmadu Bello
University. But there is
a big problem.
The school needs some funds to run its day-to-day
activities. Government funding is very poor and nobody is certain about its
coming on time. When I advised the principal to collect money from the
students, she expressed fears: parents would report her in the media accusing
her of imposing tax on the students despite government’s free education policy.
They would curse her and abuse her and call her mean.
In the past, the school collected money from the students
to buy aerosol, brooms, chalk, books and kill other small expenditures. Now
free education forbids this. The school has been unable to pay a debt accrued
for fixing broken chairs since last term.
Free education is not solution to the concomitant
problems surrounding public schools system.
None of the policy makers enrolls their kids in public schools and they
continue to pretend that what they are doing is right even when they believe
that their kids won’t have quality education for free. You can’t take your
child to a place where you pay top dollar and ask the public to send their kids
to schools that offer free education. Except you have ill-feelings. When you
hear Honourable A, B, C and X, Y, Z in government say the children are the
leaders of tomorrow, categorically tell them they are liars. Like they rule you
with impunity, they want their children to rule over your children.
Instead of this charade, officials should make it clear
to the parents that they have a big share of responsibility in financing the
education of their children. The truth should be unveiled to the public so that
they would stop believing that next to God is Government in terms of abundant
resources and possibilities as they are indoctrinated to believe for decades.
Free education is a short-run policy incentive until when
government has put together adequate preparation. Considering our situation,
this would be possible not in near future.
Sleep, sleep and time will come when you wake up to
discover that almost everything has shifted hand to private sector and
government is just a regulatory body. If you don’t start preparing by now, you
will be in a great difficulty when the time comes.
We know the reputation of schools under Science and
Technical Schools Board. They are not private schools nor free institutions.
They are schools with some, should I say, backwater African school substandard
funding and infrastructure. Seriousness and merit of the applicants come first
as an utmost priority for enrollment. Even students from poor background have
their families able to pay for their school fees. The school breeds generations
of brilliant scientists and technologists in Kano.
It is not a rational decision to offer free education,
especially at the grassroots level, to a people, whose majority, are not
serious about the education of their children, parents who are reluctant to pay
Parents Teachers Association dues. You should not offer free education to
people who are unwilling to pay weekly alms to the Alaramma that teaches their
children the knowledge of their own religion. You can’t offer something for
free to somebody who does not value that commodity.
If government in Kano
has genuine intent towards education sector, massive overhaul of the entire
public school system should be undertaken, so as to make schools operate like
those under Science and Technical Schools Board, making quality education
accessible to only those who have genuine desire for it and would pay for it.
I am not capitalist, I understand the harsh reality of
our people. While teenage Rukah and each of her friends can spend half a
million naira to organize a show on campus, some families have to struggle for
a month before they be able to get one thousand naira to pay for the school
fees of their kids. But little money as charged in secondary and primary
schools won’t kill.
However, parents have their own lion share of the blame.
I am yet to come across a family that has married off a daughter without
furniture. It is the rule rather than the exception. Such cultural rule must be
obeyed no matter the economic condition.
Family, relatives and even neighbors must produce such article to save
their face. Insha Allah we will turn the situation around.
If people are always able to provide such costly
commodities, why the society would fail to afford the education of their kids?
If we do that, what we come for here on earth?
Our problems, poverty, disease, begging etc, will not
vanish until we become truly educated either Islamic or Western. I seriously
need to find reconciliation of the apparent contradictions between what
religion says and what people are doing.
The only thing that can explain this deteriorating
condition of education is unseriousness and mutual deception from the part of
the officials and the parents. While official are deliberate and tactical, the
masses are gullible and uncaring. I don’t know why people are very unwilling to
care for the education of the children they have produced. They view education
as unworthy endeavor that should be given for free. Free education seems to me
like free ignorance.
