Why primary education is deteriorating – Prof. Oyotunde

Professor Timothy O. Oyotunde is a senior lecturer and coordinator of post-graduate programmes at the University of Jos, Plateau State. In this interview with Daily Trust, he enumerates reasons why quality of education at primary level is deteriorating. He also opines that until government invests massively in this subsector, education will continue to suffer a serious setback in the country. Excerpts:

The standard of education at primary level is believed to be poor. What can you say about this?
Well, there are two or three ways of looking at the problem of education at the basic level. One, the kind of teacher training our primary school teacher gets. It appears that our teachers are not being adequately prepared for the job in terms of language, content and professional development because there are three things that make a quality or a good teacher. One, you have to be competent in the language of instruction. It is very important because if you are not competent in the language of instruction, you would not be able to communicate your ideas effectively to the children. Two, you need to be grounded in the content so that you will know how to break the content into manageable units for the children for them to know the content. Otherwise, you will communicate misinformation. Indeed, if you are not grounded in the content the probability is that you will not be confident in the classroom and then what you give would be full of errors and inadequacies and that is not education. And, three, is professional knowledge. In other words, you must be familiar with methods and theories of teaching, you must be in a position to plan your lessons; you must know how to state your objectives, assemble your activities, deliver the content, assess the children and monitor your progress, that is formative and summative evaluation. A good teacher should be able to teach children to think and not just to memorise information and this requires retraining of the teachers. And that training should be done by good teacher trainers because you cannot give what you do not have. Another very important aspect is supervision. Our teachers are not supervised adequately. Take, for instance, teachers in private schools, most of them are not better than those in the public schools but because they are being constantly monitored, we can all see the difference. A teacher cannot do anything he likes but in public schools they do whatever they like, whether you plan your lesson or not, nobody cares.

Are you blaming agencies responsible for producing teachers such as colleges of education for not doing their jobs?
Well, it is difficult to blame one single factor for this. I am also from the faculty of education where we produce teachers so I am saying that we are not doing enough. Possibly it is the problem related to the time within which teachers are being produced because the time is very short and, even at the point of entry, most of these students are illiterate. A number of them can be seen struggling to master the fundamentals of reading and writing while in the school, so many of them cannot cope with the demands of the curriculum. Some of the things that are taking place in the classrooms and some of the demands of the text books are above them. Some are just struggling to master the language of instruction, which is part of the problem. And then the teacher trainers need to be conversant with the theories, principles and methods of teaching and ensure that no student teacher gets away with any underserved grade. Don’t just say let my people go, and pass them, that is not helping the system. So our attitude to teaching profession has to change if we want to make the difference. We must see the teacher as number one and we need to remunerate them appropriately. But as we can see today many students who come to read education or who come to prepare for teaching profession do so at the last resort. Their minds are not there, they are not committed to it and they just want to get the certificate and go, so that is why you can’t just blame one factor. But I believe if the society gives priority attention to teaching profession, if teachers are recognised as important and particularly if the teachers are paid well, it will attract more qualified people, motivated people who are concerned about teaching. Now, only very few actually enjoy the profession and we need to look at that.

In your own opinion, what can government do to improve the quality of our teachers at the basic level?
Well, I think three or four basic things. One, invest massively in teacher training and retraining, make sure that there are adequate facilities for their training, ensure that during the training they have opportunities to do teaching practice or micro teaching and they should be encouraged by way of giving them allowance during the training and they need to be given enough time to stay in the college or university because most of the courses are rushed. The inputs always determine the outputs. Two, constant in-service training is not something you can do in two or three days. We need to develop these people, almost from the scratch, in terms of building them up, in terms of their language competence and in terms of their knowledge of content. We should not assume that they already know the content therefore they don’t need any training. Enrich them with facilities, more information about their profession and all that will really help. Third, pay them well, you see there is this popular saying that teachers rewards are in the heaven but before they get to the heaven, they need to survive here. So give them what will make them survive. And finally, there must be constant monitoring.

How many years do think would be enough to produce a good teacher?
The National Universities Commission (NUC) is thinking of five years and I think it is a good start. This will give enough time for practical. The commission is thinking of six months or one year of training in the classrooms where they will be supervised and that is very important. The supervisors should also be given adequate funds to be able to do that. I think if we can go by this, we will begin to see changes in the profession. I have said earlier that there must be a way of upgrading their language skills because there isn’t much you can do if you cannot communicate effectively in the language of instruction. If you want quality education you should be willing to pay for it. Quality education carries a price tag and that price tag first of all means investing massively in teacher development, we cannot run away from that. Teachers are very important and they affect more or less the eternity of our children-physical, social, intellectual, emotional and even spiritual aspect of the lives of the children, so they need to be given priority. If we can do that and provide adequate facilities, structures and, of course, books I think we will be able to upgrade the quality of our education at the basic level. And it is not something that cannot be done in Nigeria.

Tweet