Focus on mind education, Caleb VC tells stakeholders

Vice Chancellor of Caleb University, Imota, Lagos, Prof. Daniel Aina, has lamented that the major challenge facing Nigeria’s education sector is that it is not functional as he stressed the need for the country to engage in service education like the South Korea.

The VC said this in a chat with some journalists in his office at Imota, Ikorodu where he stressed the importance of value based education as a tool to advance the country in area of technology.

We need to develop the right attitude in our students, the Caleb University approach is to use the South Korean experience, a nation that emerged with no crude oil or mineral resources but focused on mind education and dignity of labour. Our students should be able to move anywhere in the world to render service so that they can turn their classroom experience to what is useful for the society”, he said.

He said students of the university are embedded with mind education at their first two years of study in order to change their mindsets before moving to entrepreneurship in their last two years of study.

Prof. Aina urged the public to highlight some of the things that government is doing well so that they can do more and not to concentrate on their woes.

On the level of in security in Ikorodu as a result of suspected culti group, Badoo, the VC said the University management is collaborating with all security agencies to ensure that lives of students and staff as well as their property are secured but added that except the Lord keep watch over a city, in vain the night watch stay awake.

He said the university is collaborating with research team from Canada, USA and some African countries on environmental issues facing Lagos State to conduct a research on public dump sites and their implications on public health.

We are starting with the Ojota refuse site, because we believe that once people drop refuse there, something goes to the ground and the same people will dig boreholes close to the area and drink the water, there must be some health implications to this. We are interested in doing environmental impact analysis to be able to advise the government properly on what to do to the site”, he said.

He also urged the public to change their mindset about private institutions, saying proprietors of private universities have philanthropic gesture. He said that Caleb University for instance charges N350, 000 for tuition fee which is not commensurate with the expenses of running the institution.

One student’s school fees is not enough to pay a Professor’s salary. We just completed a sports stadium at Lekki which gulped about N500 million. When people talk about private universities being expensive, they are saying so in relation to their income but in real sense, proprietors of private universities are sacrificing”, he said.

He also cautioned that faith based universities are not coming up to substitute public universities but to supplement them, saying they are founded to build the right values in the minds of youths.