RAISING RASCALS
RAISING RASCALS
It’s every parents dream is to bring up well mannered children. Every coach’s, to groom superb players. Every mentor looks towards recreating a better masterpiece of himself in his protégé. When you see a prodigy, you look through his lineage to find who influenced him. It seems so in every field save the Nigerian academe.
Here you hear things like, “You will fail”, “I will deal with you and you won’t graduate”, from your supposed academic coach!
It’s so sad that you spend 4-5years in school and after graduating, you spend almost the same time just to collect your hard earned certificate.
You go for a postgraduate degree and you already know you are your own lecturer, yet you paid for full time and you have lecturer names on your timetable.
You finish your coursework and thesis and for flimsy reasons ranging from personal vacations to individual vexations that have nothing to do with you, you are made to pay tuition fees, semester after semester, be you taught or not.
You finish with a HND and you have inherited a curse. You are insulted at work and after and when its time to become an administrator, you are reminded that you are an Osu! (cursed citizen).
A football field will never take above 22 players, at most they substitute, while in our places of learning, rather than 30-40 students per class, you get a battalion of 150-300 hungry and confused minds and at the end of their years, they learn more from their fellow students than those that are paid to teach them.
The students increase and so does school fees but the lecturers are intentionally kept low and unemployed. Unequal yoking.
You get to levels where you can’t become a Professor because someone else got there before you and doesn’t think he can share what doesn’t even belong to him.
It’s in this field, male tutors no longer have just students but also concubines in the same class, and they effectively handle more than the courses assigned to them to teach.
Let’s not just count corruption in dollars or budget padding schemes. Behold the citadels of knowledge and see that the currency for corruption is labeled as truancy, laxity, witch-hunting, nepotism, sexual pervasion and aggravated ignorance encapsulated in personal pride.
If you educate a man, you have solved many, if not all, of his life’s challenges. How does Nigeria get Better when those who should be lecturers don’t even qualify as student?
We are asking people to give what they don’t have. Be groomed before you opt to groom. You can’t teach what you don’t know and if you try, you recreate a More Despicable YOU.
Am i saying that nothing good happens in schools? Not at all. Infact testimonies abound but for today, let’s speak about the ills.
Am i saying all these things happen? Yes, even worse!
We lecturers are successfully breeding blockheads, tutoring touts, grooming grumps, raising rascals and populating the faculty of the unemployed and unemployable, simply because we don’t know that we are craftsmen of today’s country and tomorrow’s continent.
I look to myself and I tell myself, “if you are not doing enough to change what’s around you, dont expect any change in your surrounding”.
I wont just stop at talking and condemning acts, i will buckle my shoes and tighten my belt and do more than I have been doing because even if a tree can’t make a forest, it can start one.
Our major problem is not just ignorance, it is the celebration of it.
CHANGE DOESN’T JUST BEGIN WITH ME….
CHANGE IS ME!
Matt 7:3 “So why do you see the piece of sawdust in another believer’s eye and not notice the wooden beam in your own eye?” (GW)