The Invisible Curtain

The quality of education a child gets in Nigeria today is dependent on the economic status of the child’s family and increasingly there is an invisible curtain separating children based on the economic status of their families. Once upon a time in Nigeria, children met freely across economic status.

They lived in the same neighbourhoods, they attended the same schools and grew side by side going through life together irrespective of the economic status of their families. All that has changed! It is common to have children who absolutely do not have idea of what the life of children of families of different economic status look like.

The neighbourhoods are now firmly divided based on economic status and schools that used to be common meeting grounds are no longer so. It was common in Nigeria of yesterday to have child of a policeman and the child of the President be in the same classroom. It was normal to have the child of a Senator or Minister or Governor in the same school with the child of a trader, or security guard or driver.

These were the days when public schools in Nigeria were centres of excellence providing good quality education and what differentiated students was their academic, oratory or sports prowess.

Today all of that is no longer the case. What we have are public schools most of which waste 12 or even 16 years of the lives of the students that go through them with nothing being achieved. It is no longer a surprising occurrence to find a student who has finished secondary school unable toread and write.This is slowly getting to even those who have finished University. The low quality education in the public schools have forced many to enroll their children in private schools some of which are just a little better than the public schools.

The higher the quality of education in a private school the higher the school fees and many have been forced to be in schools not based on their academic capacity but based on the economic status of their families.
I consider the greatest injustice in Nigeria today to be that access to good quality education is dependent on the economic status of one’s family.

This shouldn’t be so. Education is supposed to be a leveler that levels out the discrepancies of circumstance of birth. With education one can aspire to be anything and reach the peak of any career or profession. Education is the easiest way to break the shackles of poverty and so you can imagine the injustice of denying some good quality education because their parents cannot afford the school fees to ensure they get good quality education.

If Nigeria is to develop as a Nation, education must beprioritised. Good quality education must be a given. Free and good quality education must be available to every child through the primary and secondary school years. The importance of primary and secondary education cannot be overemphasized.

No Nation can grow without it.An uneducated populace is a burden to the State. Primary and secondary education is of immense value not just to the recipient but to the State and contributes greatly to the development of the State. Tertiary education which is more specialisedfavours the individual more than the State and reason why many Countries ensure premium is paid for it while providing free good quality primary and secondary education.

Having children segregated based on the economic status of their families is bound to have an adverse effect on our society in the years to come when they would meet for the first time as adults in the society. How would they relate with each other having lived oblivious of the other or been on the fringes watching each other?
How can people who never met in their formative years suddenly relate with each other in their adulthood? University which was the last meeting point is now also being separated. The public universities are slowly being left for those who cannot afford to go to private universities or go abroad in search of better quality education.

With the deterioration of security and standard of living dropping drastically, we must do everything possible to ensure that we do not have a society divided and resentful of each other in the future.

Everything must be done to ensure that the standard of education in public schoolsis greatly improved upon. Let the reason parents enroll their children in private schools no longer be because of good quality education but because of something extra. Our private and public schools can help attract educational tourism if properly developed. This can be a source of revenue for the Nation. Wherever there is good quality education people will seek for it!