Overtime we have come to believe that the
performance of students lies in factors ranging from their attitude to studies,
facilities exposed to and some other environmental factors. At the best of our
wonderful assumptions and assertions we have exhausted all what seems to be
what we think is the solution of which we have applied practically and
principally without getting the desired results.
A salient but silent institution that we have
failed to explore and dig into which has ravaged and hampered our development
collectively as a nation is the concept of Innate abilities and passion. It is
a necessity that even the best of professors and academics have willingly
turned blind eyes on and of which its perils thereof has never failed to
terrorize our aspirations and lust for societal and technological advancement.
As we continue to shower the blame on exam
bodies like WAEC and JAMB for the poor turnout of results and also the Nigerian
tertiary institutions for the routine of churning out less than average and
globally incompetent graduates of about 300,000 annually of which they
eventually unleash into the labor market, it is imperative that we pause and
take a critical look into what has being and how to go about it.
A less thought of but first question to start
with is how many of these graduates wanted to study the courses of which they
have been certified but are invariably less satisfied? The Nigerian setting has
made it imperative and clear that some courses are professional while some are
not why because there is a higher percentage of assurance that after graduation
there is a job already tailored for this discipline, forgetting that there was
a time when the so called professional courses were not regarded because of
their irrelevance to the common man on the streets of which a good example is
that in a domain where there is no petroleum as natural resource, the
profession petroleum engineering is of little or no value. But the stark truth
which is as crucial as the effect of the menace is that the dignity and
nobility of any profession lies in its capacity and potentials to solve the
problems of the common man in the sphere of its reach or better still within
its ambit or proximity.
So the rat race begins from the secondary
school where the most intelligent of students must study sciences because there
is no fortune and prestige in the social sciences, arts, and commercial
courses, thereby bringing to extinction the talented and futuristic Achebe’s
and Soyinka’s of which I would have to refer to this mentality as genocidal
ignorance. Can these parents look into their children truthfully and see the
innate abilities and gifts in them beyond their selfish stances and think out
better ways in which these gifts can be harnessed in these children who are victims
of unrealized parental dreams and misfortunes? Can they see ways in which these
God given gifts can turn around the fortune of our great nation and world at
large and not kill these resources with which God has blessed this generation
with? A practical example is the prevalent psychic maelstrom exhibited as the
crave for the much celebrated title of “mama doctor” ravaging the average
Nigerian mother not minding if the child even has any clue about what it
entails been a doctor or even worse of all has the hunger and love for the
profession.
Another manifestation of this is seen in our
educational system where the biology teacher who read Education/biology cares
free to look into his students to know who replaces him as a teacher to future
generations because every good biology student must be a doctor or a health
scientist as erroneously assumed. Is he or she to be fully blamed, I partly
disagree because there was a system which had called teachers burning with
passion to teach and not the present day where the advent of private schools
has made teaching a solace for both the unemployed and unemployable.
However this misnomer is carried over to the
university where an undergraduate is given a project topic in a field of little
or no interest and the result of such project becomes a dead end that no
reasonable discovery can be made from, and we are still asking why an average
graduate of our raped educational system cannot carry out successful researches
on topical issues staring at our faces, forgetting that the record for the
youngest Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine was that of a certain Sir Frederick
Banting for his discovery of the hormone insulin at the age of 22 just as a
fresh graduate medical doctor.
The government on its own needs to rehabilitate
the moribund departments of guidance and counseling in our elementary and
post-elementary schools where the mentality of self discovery by our pupils at
this early stage is encouraged. So for our government, the best place to start
the rebranding process is not in the media enthusiasm but in institutionalizing a mentality that
encourages personal development,foundational laying and individual
responsibility on the part of every citizen as a tool for nation building.
Stories of children that outlived this
parental and societal pressures are innumerable but worth imitating from the
likes of Jonas Salk the inventor of the polio vaccine who was a lawyer turned
Scientist to Arnold Schwarzenegger whose Mother forced into becoming a
carpenter but took up the hobby of soccer where he was advised to take up body
building for performance enhancement by his coach of which was where he found
his fortune, or do I talk of the legendary Nelson Mandela who was almost forced
into marriage against his wish, the story continues and is endless.
As it has been said that you can force a horse
to the stream, but the pleasure of drinking is what you cannot superimpose on
it. Our parents, guardians and supervisors must have to learn that a child’s
greatest happiness is seen when he or she accomplishes a task that gives him or
her satisfaction. I write this not to be misconstrued as an assertion or a
figment of idle imagination, but unlike Jonas Salk who said ‘’I have had dreams
and I have had nightmares but the secret of my success is that my dreams have
been able to conquer my night mares,’’ the dream of any child might be
conquered by the dream of his ambitious guardian which apparently appears to be
his worst nightmare.
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