Nothing is more difficult to analyse than the future. However, with the amount of information and tools available today, one can predict with relative ease and precision, what the future holds in certain regards, much like looking in a crystal ball.
The future of education in Nigeria holds so much promise, even though at the moment it seems to be heading towards a downward plunge. The education sector is among the slowest growing sectors in the Nigerian economy. This is not in terms of how much the country generates from education, or how many million students graduate yearly from various academic institutions in the country. If these were the metrics with which we measure growth, Nigeria would have ranked among the countries with the best education standards. The yardstick for my measurement of the performance of our education sector is the overall impact of the sector in driving economic growth and development through human capital development. How much does our educational system address the dearth of people with the required skills and technological know-how to create a self-sustaining economy?
The pace of growth of the education sector is not as important as the direction it is heading. JAMB may be registering millions of students yearly for its matriculation examination, and higher institutions may be turning out millions of graduates yearly, but are these graduates really equipped with what it takes to contribute meaningfully to the progress of the country? These are questions we must answer if we wish to develop our education sector and reap the ripple effect of an effective education system on the economic health of a nation.
With the foregoing said, my inclination is to think that the education sector is heading in the right direction. In recent years, obvious efforts have been made to improve the sector through specific government programs like the N-Power Teach which aims at deploying more teachers to the classroom to reduce the lack of teachers in many primary and secondary schools across the country.
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