By Martins Idakwo
In a bid towards increasing the number of teachers in the country, the federal government has approved the establishment and immediate take-off of six new Federal Colleges of Education in each of the six geo-political zones in the country.
The new institutions will be located in Bauchi, Benue, Ebonyi, Osun, Sokoto, and Edo States.
This was disclosed by the Public Relations Officer of National Commission for Colleges of Education (NCCE), Mr Ameh Isaac, who stated that the newly approved institutions would be situated in Bauchi, Benue, Eboyi, Osun, Sokoto, and Edo states, which had no Federal Colleges of Education. Together there are 152 colleges of education in Nigeria, consisting of 21 federal, 82 private and 49 state colleges.
With the opening of more colleges of education, the students ,of the beneficial communities will tend to learn or hone teaching skills that will stay with them for a lifetime. Some of the skills will be very useful in employment, such as expert communication skills, superior listening skills ,friendliness and approachability. Presentation and research skills, and then community- building skills.
According to university of the people,
the following attributes make the difference between a good teacher and a truly great teacher who becomes an inspiration to their students.
1. Compassion: Compassion is important not only when dealing with the students but also other teachers, other school staff, and parents.
2. Passion for Learning and Children: Teaching can be incredibly stressful, so great teachers must have a deep passion to keep them going every day.
3. Understanding: Teachers need a deep understanding of where their students are coming from — their backgrounds, their struggles, and their abilities.
4. Patience: Patience is key. This is very true of teaching, and not just patience with the students! Teachers also need patience in dealing with the school system, bureaucracy, and parents as well.
5. Ability to Be a Role Model: Teachers must come into work every day knowing their students will soak up their actions like sponges. They must show how to be a good person not just by telling, but also by being.
6. Communication Across Generations and Cultures:Teachers need to be able to effectively communicate with students from multiple cultures and generations, as well as teaching staff and superiors with various backgrounds and from other generations.
7. Willingness to Put in the Effort: If a teacher doesn’t care or doesn’t make the effort, their students won’t either. If a teacher shows students that they do truly care, they’ll do the same.
So if the newly created colleges of education and all other existing college of education can bring out this attributes out of it’s students, it will be a very beautiful site to behold. Not just making the numbers and the new colleges of education will not come and participate in another ‘’ waka pass” .
Personally I think the problem of Nigerian tertiary institution is not just the creation of new ones but the lack of appropriate funding.
What do Mark Zuckerberg, Cosmas Maduka, (Coscharis group) Cletus Madubugwu Ibeto , Vincent Obianodo ( The young shall grow)Bill Gates, and Rasak Akanni Okoya all have in common? They all attended very little school before dropping out. However, none of these people are unsuccessful or uneducated. There is more than one way to be an educated man, and they do not all come from schooling. So the ministry of education in my own opinion is suppose to balance schooling and education.
The university of the mentorship system of a typical Igbo man in Aba or main market in Onitsha is been schooled on a particular line of business, he eats it, sleeps it, dreams it and talk it ,there by building capacity. This is largely what is missing in most graduates in the Nigeria educational system.
There is so much wrong with the school systems nowadays. There has been very little change in classrooms, teaching styles and schools over the past century yet there has been extensive change within society and the whole world. The same schooling that lead a student to success in 1900 will not necessarily work now, in 2020, with our extensive technology advancements and completely different outlook on the world. Grades, tests, quizzes, report cards, college, GPA’s. Those are the focuses of a typical school student In Nigeria. The emphasis in school has been taken off of learning and mastering content to getting the best grades possible. Students are pit against each other in competition for the best grades and highest GPA. In order to “win” this competition students often do whatever they think it will take, cheating, plagiarism, you name it, they’ve tried it. Schools are full of half-asleep zombie students who don’t always make the most out of the opportunity given to them. Students are too busy checking score sheets for their updated GPA’s after the most recent test they took, hoping to see the green up arrow, meaning their grade increased.
Education is a life-long process. In fact, education doesn’t, just happen in a structured period of time, or formal instruction. Actually, education can take place anytime, anywhere, in the middle of a full life, in formal and informal ways. It takes place in the midst of creation, society, culture, and work. Education has to do with the cultural trinity: Truth, Beauty and Goodness.
Sometimes schooling can stand as a barrier to children learning, growing in wisdom and understanding, becoming educated in knowledge and virtue.
Note that education is comprehensive. It deals with both the gaining of knowledge and the development of character – virtue. And the combination of virtue and knowledge leads to wisdom.
The Funding Situation in Nigeria tertiary institution is that the FG and ASUU agreed to redirect the Education Fund just to target government higher institutions. Before this, Nigerian companies were expected to pay an education tax of 2% of their assessable profit into an education fund. The fund was established to promote research, staff training, and infrastructural development in federal, state, and local educational institutions.
And initially, the fund was shared among the different tiers of educational institutions, including higher institutions, primary, and secondary schools. However, this was replaced by the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) in 2011, which now grants only higher institutions to have access to the fund.
In 2016, the government generated ₦47 billion from the tertiary education tax (TET). But once we compare that to ASUU’s ₦1.5 trillion (per the 2009 agreement), it is a drop in the ocean. Meanwhile, ₦542 billion was allocated to the Federal Ministry of Education in 2018, with just ₦5.6 billion set aside for capital expenditure for all the 36 federal universities in Nigeria. We can’t get any where with this!
In the same vein, Tertiary institution are suppose to intensify their efforts in making discoveries and inventions that can assist in the development of Nigeria.
Research, critical thinking, moral dispositions, discoveries and inventions should find natural habitats in our universities, as they do in several other universities in the world,
Tertiary institutions are supposed to be strong drivers of the country’s development initiatives for sustainable development.
Here, I want to share just a few of those important innovations that come to us courtesy of the hard work of academics and researchers from universities and colleges all over the world.
Producing the contraceptive pill
In 1961 Herchel Smith, a researcher at the University of Manchester, developed an inexpensive way of producing chemicals that stop women ovulating during their monthly menstrual cycle.
The first test tube baby
Cambridge University embryologist, Robert Edwards and his colleague Patrick Steptoe, were the first to develop the IVF technique, to enable infertile women to have babies.
Modern infertility treatment
Medical scientists, led by Robert Winston at Imperial College London, have developed a number of tests that enable doctors to select newly created embryos that do not contain the genetic abnormalities.
Scans during pregnancy seeing babies through sound
Ian Donald invented the use of ultrasound for unborn babies at the University of Glasgow 40 years ago.
Spina bifida and folic acid
In 1974, Nicholas Wald, then at Oxford University, discovered a way of predicting whether babies are likely to have debilitating paralysing conditions, such as spina bifida and anencephaly (where the brain is small, or missing altogether).
Some might poke fun at academic research or doubt the necessity of it, but the reality is that the products of tertiary institutions research impacts our lives on a daily basis, often in ways we don’t even realize. From the Internet to the car seat belt , many amazing innovations were the products of professors and students working at universities or colleges around the world. Some of these innovations have changed the world, others have saved lives, but all have had a significant impact on life throughout the past decades.
It was Tim O’Reilly who said that
‘’An invention has to make sense in the world it finishes in, not in the world it started”.
The African Continents has been faced with some many challenges, who says we can’t find solutions to our own problems. Some of the problems that needs inventions in Nigeria and Africa are :
A cheap, portable water filtration device
The problem: Nearly 200 million people lack access to clean and safe water, according to the Water Project, a nonprofit that focuses on water issues.
A smokeless solar cooker for developing countries
The problem: Cooking in the developing world often requires large amounts of costly fuel and creates harmful smoke as a byproduct.
Until we begin to see ourselves as problem solvers and the Tertiary institutions as the ones spare heading the process, we will be jogging on the spot.
Increasing graduation rates and levels of educational attainment will accomplish
little if students do not learn something of lasting value.
Yet federal efforts over the last several years have focused much more on increasing the number of Nigerian’s
who go to tertiary institution than on improving the education they receive once
they get there.
By concentrating so heavily on graduation rates and attainment levels, policy makers are ignoring danger signs that the amount that students learn in college may have declined over the past few decades
and could well continue to do so in the years to come.
The reasons for concern include: College students today seem to be spending
much less time on their course work than their predecessors did 50 years ago, and evidence of their abilities suggests
that they are probably learning less than
students once did and quite possibly less than their counterparts in many other advanced industrial countries.
Employers complain that many graduates they hire are deficient in basic skills such as writing, problem solving and critical thinking that college leaders and their faculties consistently rank among the most important goals of an undergraduate education.
Most of the millions of additional students needed to increase educational attainment levels will come to campus poorly prepared for course work, creating a danger that higher graduation rates will be achievable only by lowering academic standards.
States have made substantial cuts in support per student over the past years for
public colleges and community colleges. Research suggests that failing to increase
appropriations to keep pace with enrollment growth tends to reduce learning and even lower graduation rates.
While some college leaders are making serious efforts to improve the quality of
teaching, many others seem content with their existing programs.
Although they recognize the existence of problems affecting higher education as a whole, such as grade inflation or a decline in the rigor of academic standards, few seem to believe that these difficulties exist on their own campus, or they tend to
attribute most of the difficulty to the poor preparation of students before they enroll.
In Conclusion, many colleges provide a formidable array of courses, majors and
extracurricular opportunities, but first hand accounts indicate that many undergraduates do not feel that the material conveyed in their readings and lectures has much relevance to their lives.
Such sentiments suggest either that the
courses do not in fact contribute much to the ultimate goals that colleges claim to value or that instructors are not taking
sufficient care to explain the larger aims of their courses and why they should matter.
Other studies suggest that many instructors do not teach their courses in ways best calculated to achieve
the ends that faculties themselves consider important.
So the opening of more colleges of education should be slowed down and
funding of research by tertiary Institution should be accelerated so that how institutions can invent and own the patent
right.
