Emmanuel Jimmy|12 November 2017
For sometime now the media; print, electronic, social and what have you have been buzzing with the news of the sack of about 22, 000 primary school teachers who couldn't pass a competency test that was administered to them.
Equally disturbing is the fact that this bunch constituted about a staggering 73 percent of the teaching workforce for the Kaduna state primary schools board before the massive purge boldly embarked upon by the enfant terrible governor of the state, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai. I doff my hat for this guy. This country called Nigeria needs more El-Rufais to be able to cleanse the Augeans stable and rid our country of the mess it has become of late.
It might interest us to know that El -Rufai is not the first to conduct competency test for primary school teachers in Nigeria. The incumbent Senate President did same when he was the Governor of Kwara state and the results, just like the Kaduna saga left a sour taste in the mouth.
The Kaduna brouhaha is just a case study of what might be obtainable if the test is extended to other states of the Federation including the private schools and this is deeply troubling. This incidence raises pungent questions about the competence of those that are saddled with the responsibility of tutoring and grooming the proverbial leaders of tomorrow in our schools.
What qualifies one to be a teacher? Embarking on an historical excursion might enable us to have an idea of the kind of person a teacher should be. Those who were contracted to teach children in the ancient times were sages whose intellectual acumen were widely celebrated. Because education was an exclusive preserve of RICH aristocrats of the period, only kings and those who were close to the corridors of power could afford the humongous amount charged by these walking encyclopedias.
These learned men established Academies and Lyceum comparable to today's colleges and universities. One distinctive feature of the Sophist philosophers was that they were itinerant teachers who taught for a fee. It was magnanimous philosophers like Plato who was groomed by the morally conscious Socrates that mooted the idea that education should be controlled and regulated by the state.
From the foregoing it can be seen that the teaching profession was not an all comers affair unlike the charade we are witnessing today. It's not enough to compulsorily ram 15-20 exercise books and textbooks with unending hours lessons down the throats of primary 2 pupils but decide to gloss over the competence (I am not talking about teachers parading high sounding degrees in Education) of the teacher.
I was privileged to teach briefly in secondary schools (not in Kaduna o but here in Calabar, Rivers, Edo and my home state of Akwa Ibom) before I ventured into the University system and I saw "unspeakable things which are not lawful for a man to utter" apologies to the biblical Apostle Paul. If 20 questions selected from junior secondary one curricula in English Language, simple Arithmetic and general studies are administered on teachers recruited in our schools TODAY can we boast of 25 percent performance if the pass-mark is 40percent?
How did we come to this sorry pass? How can we salvage the situation? Who will bell the cat?
Emmanuel Jimmy
Is a university teacher
