Nigeria EDUCATION
Students at recess in a Lagos primary school
Courtesy Embassy of Nigeria, Washington
Outdoor class at a Quran school in Lagos in the early
1960s
Courtesy Embassy of Nigeria, Washington
There were three fundamentally distinct education
systems in
Nigeria in 1990: the indigenous system, Quranic schools,
and
formal European-style education institutions. In the rural
areas
where the majority lived, children learned the skills of
farming
and other work, as well as the duties of adulthood, from
participation in the community. This process was often
supplemented by age-based schools in which groups of young
boys
were instructed in community responsibilities by mature
men.
Apprentice systems were widespread throughout all
occupations;
the trainee provided service to the teacher over a period
of
years and eventually struck out on his own. Truck driving,
building trades, and all indigenous crafts and services
from
leather work to medicine were passed down in families and
acquired through apprenticeship training as well. In 1990
this
indigenous system included more than 50 percent of the
school-age
population and operated almost entirely in the private
sector;
there was virtually no regulation by the government unless
training included the need for a license. By the 1970s,
education
experts were asking how the system could be integrated
into the
more formal schooling of the young, but the question
remained
unresolved by 1990.
Islamic education was part of religious duty. Children
learned up to one or two chapters of the Quran by rote
from a
local mallam, or religious teacher, before they
were five
or six years old. Religious learning included the Arabic
alphabet
and the ability to read and copy texts in the language,
along
with those texts required for daily prayers. Any Islamic
community provided such instruction in a mallam's
house,
under a tree on a thoroughfare, or in a local mosque. This
primary level was the most widespread. A smaller number of
those
young Muslims who wished, or who came from wealthier or
more
educated homes, went on to examine the meanings of the
Arabic
texts. Later, grammar, syntax, arithmetic, algebra, logic,
rhetoric, jurisprudence, and theology were added; these
subjects
required specialist teachers at the advanced level. After
this
level, students traditionally went on to one of the famous
Islamic centers of learning.
For the vast majority, Muslim education was delivered
informally under the tutelage of mallams or ulama,
scholars who specialized in religious learning and
teaching.
Throughout the colonial period, a series of formal Muslim
schools
were set up and run on European lines. These schools were
established in almost all major Nigerian cities but were
notable
in Kano, where Islamic brotherhoods developed an
impressive
number of schools. They catered to the children of the
devout and
the well-to-do who wished to have their children educated
in the
new and necessary European learning, but within a firmly
religious context. Such schools were influential as a form
of
local private school that retained the predominance of
religious
values within a modernized school system. Because the
government
took over all private and parochial schools in the
mid-1970s and
only allowed such schools to exist again independently in
1990,
data are lacking concerning numbers of students enrolled.
Western-style education came to Nigeria with the
missionaries
in the mid-nineteenth century. Although the first mission
school
was founded in 1843 by Methodists, it was the Anglican
Church
Missionary Society that pushed forward in the early 1850s
to
found a chain of missions and schools, followed quickly in
the
late 1850s by the Roman Catholics. In 1887 in what is now
southern Nigeria, an education department was founded that
began
setting curricula requirements and administered grants to
the
mission societies. By 1914, when north and south were
united into
one colony, there were fifty-nine government and
ninety-one
mission primary schools in the south; all eleven secondary
schools, except for King's College in Lagos, were run by
the
missions. The missions got a foothold in the middle belt;
a
mission school for the sons of chiefs was opened in Zaria
in 1907
but lasted only two years. In 1909 Hans Vischer, an
ex-Anglican
missionary, was asked to organize the education system of
the
Protectorate Northern Nigeria. Schools were set up and
grants
given to missions in the middle belt. In 1914 there were
1,100
primary school pupils in the north, compared with 35,700
in the
south; the north had no secondary schools, compared with
eleven
in the south. By the 1920s, the pressure for school places
in the
south led to increased numbers of independent schools
financed by
local efforts and to the sending of favorite sons overseas
for
more advanced training.
The education system focused strongly on examinations.
In
1916 Frederick Lugard, first governor of the unified
colony, set
up a school inspectorate. Discipline, buildings, and
adequacy of
teaching staff were to be inspected, but the most points
given to
a school's performance went to the numbers and rankings of
its
examination results. This stress on examinations was still
used
in 1990 to judge educational results and to obtain
qualifications
for jobs in government and the private sector.
Progress in education was slow but steady throughout
the
colonial era until the end of World War II. By 1950 the
country
had developed a three-tiered system of primary, secondary,
and
higher education based on the British model of wide
participation
at the bottom, sorting into academic and vocational
training at
the secondary level, and higher education for a small
elite
destined for leadership. On the eve of independence in the
late
1950s, Nigeria had gone through a decade of exceptional
educational growth leading to a movement for universal
primary
education in the Western Region. In the north, primary
school
enrollments went from 66,000 in 1947 to 206,000 in 1957,
in the
west (mostly Yoruba areas) from 240,000 to 983,000 in the
same
period, and in the east from 320,000 to 1,209,000.
Secondary
level enrollments went from 10,000 for the country as a
whole in
1947 to 36,000 in 1957; 90 percent of these, however, were
in the
south.
Given the central importance of formal education, it
soon
became "the largest social programme of all governments of
the
federation," absorbing as much as 40 percent of the
budgets of
some state governments. Thus, by 1984-85 more than 13
million
pupils attended almost 35,000 public primary schools. At
the
secondary level, approximately 3.7 million students were
attending 6,500 schools (these numbers probably included
enrollment in private schools), and about 125,000
postsecondary
level students were attending 35 colleges and
universities. The
pressure on the system remained intense in 1990, so much
so that
one education researcher predicted 800,000 higher level
students
by the end of the 1990s, with a correlated growth in
numbers and
size of all education institutions to match this estimate.
Universal primary education became official policy for
the
federation in the 1970s. The goal has not been reached
despite
pressure throughout the 1980s to do so. In percentage
terms,
accomplishments have been impressive. Given an approximate
population of 49.3 million in 1957 with 23 percent in the
primary
school age-group (ages five to fourteen), the country had
21
percent of its school-age population attending in the
period just
prior to independence, after what was probably a tripling
of the
age-group in the preceding decade. By 1985 with an
estimated
population of 23 million between ages five and fourteen,
approximately 47 percent of the age-group attended school
(see
table 3, Appendix). Although growth slowed and actually
decreased
in some rural areas in the late 1980s, it was projected
that by
the early part of the next century universal primary
education
would be achieved.
Secondary and postsecondary level growth was much more
dramatic. The secondary level age-group (ages fifteen to
twenty-
four) represented approximately 16 percent of the entire
population in 1985. Secondary level education was
available for
approximately 0.5 percent of the age-group in 1957, and
for 22
percent of the age-group in 1985 (see
table 4, Appendix).
In the
early 1960s, there were approximately 4,000 students at
six
institutions (Ibadan, Ife, Lagos, Ahmadu Bello University,
the
University of Nigeria at Nsukka, and the Institute of
Technology
at Benin), rising to 19,000 by 1971 and to 30,000 by 1975
(see
table 5, Appendix). In 1990 there were thirty-five
polytechnic
institutes, military colleges, and state and federal
universities, plus colleges of education and of
agriculture; they
had an estimated enrollment of 150,000 to 200,000,
representing
less than 1 percent of the twenty-one to
twenty-nine-year-old
age-group.
Such growth was impossible without incurring a host of
problems, several of which were so severe as to endanger
the
entire system of education. As long as the country was
growing
apace in terms of jobs for the educated minority through
investment in expanded government agencies and services
and the
private sector, the growing numbers of graduates could be
absorbed. But the criterion of examination results as the
primary
sorting device for access to schools and universities led
to
widespread corruption and cheating among faculty and
students at
all levels, but especially secondary and postsecondary.
Most
Nigerian universities had followed the British higher
education
system of "final examinations" as the basis for granting
degrees,
but by 1990 many were shifting to the United States system
of
course credits. Economic hardship among teaching staffs
produced
increased engagement in nonacademic moonlighting
activities.
Added to these difficulties were such factors as the lack
of
books and materials, no incentive for research and
writing, the
use of outdated notes and materials, and the deficiency of
replacement laboratory equipment. One researcher noted
that in
the 1980s Nigeria had the lowest number of indigenous
engineers
per capita of any Third World country. Unfortunately,
nothing was
done to rectify the situation. The teaching of English,
which was
the language of instruction beyond primary school, had
reached
such poor levels that university faculty complained they
could
not understand the written work of their students. By 1990
the
crisis in education was such that it was predicted that by
the
end of the decade, there would be insufficient personnel
to run
essential services of the country. It was hoped that the
publication of critical works and international attention
to this
crisis might reverse the situation before Nigeria lost an
entire
generation or more of its skilled labor force.
University education has a high priority. Main library,
University of Lagos
Courtesy Orlando E. Pacheco
Arts block, University of Ibadan
Courtesy Orlando E. Pacheco
Data as of June 1991
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