The Role of Education in National Development and Civic Awareness
The educational system of any nation is the most fundamental bedrock of her development, enlightenment, and progress. Education instigates our curiosity to know more and to unravel the basis of life and the universe itself. A state that wants to transcend its own limitations and articulate a set of advantages that will activate civility, decency, progress, and patriotism must ensure that its educational system is aligned with these goals. Political leadership across the world therefore reads the pulse and impulses of development and adjusts their educational systems in ways that answer the peculiarities of their different contexts and needs.
The wave of STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—education curriculum that states all over the world are adopting is a testament to their consciousness about the place of science and technology education in the wealth and progress of nations. However, states are also conscious about how to build up a conscious, patriotic, and historically conscious citizenry that is amenable to the project of nation-building, which is the basis of political order and stability.
Nations that have been considered in many indices as violent and unstable, from South Africa to South Sudan, are now paying the price for a citizenry that has become weaponized by greed and ideological fragmentation. We then begin to see the ideological and philosophical implications of education as the medium by which a state instills critical values, ideas, and skills. And the more reason why the educational policies of states are one of the most potent expressions of the state’s philosophy of national development objectives.
The Nigerian National Policy on Education (NPE)
This is exactly the ideological essence of the Nigerian National Policy on Education (NPE). The document states that Nigeria’s overall philosophy is two-fold: (a) live in unity and harmony as one indivisible, indissoluble, democratic, and sovereign nation founded on the principles of freedom, equality, and justice, and (b) promote inter-African solidarity and world peace through understanding. This philosophy is founded on achieving five national goals: a free and democratic society, a just and egalitarian society, a united, strong, and self-reliant nation, a great and dynamic economy, and a land full of bright opportunities for all citizens.
More fundamental is that Nigeria’s philosophy of education—based on developing the individual into a sound and effective citizen, the integration of the individual into the community, and the provision of equal access to educational opportunities—is meant to facilitate “self-realization, better human relationships, individual and national efficiency, effective citizenship, national consciousness, national unity, as well as social, cultural, economic, political, scientific, and technological progress.”
This philosophy of education is even more cogent, fundamental, and well-conceived given that Nigeria is a fractured postcolonial society where religion, ethnic affiliation, cultural membership, income inequality, and sexual orientation constitute the centripetal variables that disunite and establish the basis for political instability. It therefore means that every educational blueprint, paradigms, and curricula at the disposal of the Nigerian state must be geared towards articulating a framework that brings together an effective citizenry and national development.
The Importance of History and Civic Education
The NPE poignantly stipulated the significance of history and civic education from basic education to senior secondary school. However, given that visions are often undermined by reality and circumstances, vital documents crucial for Nigeria’s progressive development are often the victims of political miscalculation and misbegotten oversights.
For a country with a vast demographics and ethnic divergences, the national and political leadership did not see the urgency for an immediate introduction of civic education into Nigeria’s basic, primary, and post-primary education curriculum until forty-eight solid years after political independence. By 1982 when Nigeria switched to the 6-3-3-4 system, history was removed from primary and junior secondary schools and downgraded into an optional subject at the senior secondary level. And then, in 2009, the FGN yanked history from the curriculum. The administration thought that the low enrollment and lack of history teachers was sufficient to remove a course that connects Nigeria to its past and the future.
Democracy and Civic Education
Democracy needs education. A flourishing democratic ethos requires significantly vibrant curricula on civic education and history. Civic awareness and civic engagement that keep feeding knowledge about government, its functions, and its responsibilities to its citizens. Indeed, it is such a civic awareness that makes democracy and democratic sophistication possible in the first instance.
Civic education is inextricably linked with history. We cannot even begin to understand what type of democracy we need to grow into, and what we need to do with our democratic aspiration, if we do not have a sense of history. We cannot make any significant move towards nationhood if we lack a coherent sense of where we are coming from and where we need to be.
The Need for a Holistic Educational Approach
Nigeria needs students—and a broad human capital development trajectory—that possess the unique and significant twenty-first-century skills: the capacity for communication, critical thinking, creative innovation, and confidence. They also need to be able to maneuver these skills within a space—communal, national, workplace—of diversity and difference.
To be a genius in science and technology, or to be an Albert Einstein in Nigeria, without these skills and humane capacities, is simply to be an educated robot. But more significantly, and within a postcolonial space like Nigeria, it is simply to be a dangerous and narrow-minded bigot who is pushed to divert his or her knowledge into prejudicial means that endanger others.
History and civic education matter for Nigeria. And our political will should be channeled towards making them matter even more in our policy architecture beyond just injecting these subjects into the curricula.
