CHUKS OLUIGBO
Sidney Hook, an American philosopher of the Pragmatist school, once contended that “the teacher is the heart of the educational system”. If this is so, shouldn’t nations desirous of developing high-quality human resources strive to attract and retain the best brains in the teaching profession? The answer, in my opinion, is that they should. For, as Lee Iacocca, the American automobile executive who spearheaded the development of Ford Mustang and Pinto cars while at the Ford Motor Company in the 1960s, once quipped, “In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less.”
Some countries
of the world are already walking this path. In an article “Raising Teacher
Quality around the World”, Vivien Stewart, senior adviser (education) and
former vice president at Asia Society, reckons that “as countries face the
challenges of a global knowledge economy that requires them to develop higher
levels of knowledge and new capacities in their students, they are focusing
intently on ways to attract high-quality candidates into the teaching
profession”.
"High-performing
countries build their human resource systems by putting the energy upfront;
they concentrate on attracting, preparing, and supporting good teachers and
nurturing teacher leadership talent," she writes.
Finland and
Singapore are at the forefront of this drive. While in Finland teaching has
become a highly sought-after career – in fact, the number one choice of
Finland’s best and brightest students – Singapore selects prospective teachers
from the top one-third of its secondary school class. In these countries,
“strong academics are essential, along with a commitment to the profession and
to serving the nation's diverse students”. In Finland (and Singapore and South
Korea), 100 percent of teachers are from the “top third”.
This can be
replicated in Nigeria – across all levels of education. Indeed, available
evidence suggests that this was once the practice in Nigerian universities,
where top-of-the-class graduates were offered automatic employment as graduate
assistants, from where they proceeded to earn further degrees and grew through
the ranks. But not anymore.
Obadiah
Mailafia, a former deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, in a recent
article “What do the Nigerian people want?”, writes: "During our time it
was the most brilliant minds who remained to teach in the universities. The
average ones went into banking and the oil industry. When the universities were
brought to their knees by the semi-literate military junta, the best minds fled
abroad while a good number went into banking and the oil and gas sector.
Ominously, the plodders became the professors. It is a dangerous development.
These were the kind of people who felt nothing about selling grades and
handouts and pestering young female students for sex in exchange of grades.
Throughout my years as an undergraduate of Ahmadu Bello University, such a
thing was never ever heard of. The system collapsed after our time and the
citadels of learning became, sadly, an open cesspool of cultism, whoredom and
violence. Today, some of those who call themselves ‘graduates’ cannot pass the
most basic of international literacy tests.”
But the rot goes
even deeper. A pilot ICPC/NUC University System Study and Review (USSR) of
corruption in the university system in 2012 identified a series of infractions
including admissions racketeering, misapplication and embezzlement of funds,
sale of examination questions, inducement to manipulate awards of degrees,
direct cheating during examinations, deliberate delays in the release of
results, victimisation of students by officials, lack of commitment to work by
lecturers, and above all, sexual harassment and exploitation of students by
lecturers.
However, the
country may be on the path to getting it right if the recently announced
National Youth Service Corps policy of deploying Nigerian graduates with First Class
degrees to tertiary institutions as lecturers is properly implemented.
At a two-day
pre-mobilisation workshop for the 2015 Batch ‘B’ NYSC programme in Kaduna
recently, the NYSC director-general, Johnson Olawumi, announced that in order
to properly mobilise the right manpower to boost the education sector, “All
corps members who graduated with First Class honours, Distinction degrees and
Diplomas will be posted to tertiary institutions for effective utilisation of
their manpower. The posting policy of the scheme is being vigorously
implemented for the achievement of the desired impact. I, therefore, appeal to
the authorities of all tertiary institutions of learning to reciprocate this
gesture by accepting and offering them permanent appointments after service.”
This policy will
not clean up the whole mess in the tertiary education system, no doubt – partly
because First Class graduates are not necessarily saints, and partly because
the issues go beyond just quality of teachers – it is nonetheless a first
necessary step in a journey of many thousand miles. Let's first get the right
quality of teachers. Our institutions of higher learning are today replete with
accidental lecturers – some of whose only recommendation is that they knew
someone who knew someone who knew someone – while some of our best brains on
whom the responsibility of raising a sound generation should naturally fall are
wasting their brains in sometimes unimaginable jobs and places. Same goes for
other levels of education.
It needs to be
stressed that building a high-quality teacher workforce does not happen by
accident; it requires deliberate policy choices. Nigeria must therefore look to
Finland, Singapore, and perhaps South Korea, for the best examples. No doubt, in
a multi-sectoral economy where education has to compete with other sectors for
talent, attracting the best brains to the teaching profession is not enough;
efforts must be made to retain them. Of course, those efforts will come at extra
cost. And why not? As Bob Talbert has let us know, “Good teachers are costly,
but bad teachers cost more.”
