Another September ending is here and with it, the season of school resumptions across the land. With the season, all the old anomies of the educational system also resume. Government has held retreats on education but nothing seems to have changed except that the Federal Government now dabbles into the issuance of textbooks to pupils nationwide. Throwing one-off contracts at issues that needed thinking through and gradual amelioration won’t get us anywhere.

One of the salient structural changes of the last two decades in the education sector has been the increasing incidence of private schools. From nursery to the university, private schools have expanded at almost exponential rates at especially pre-primary, primary and secondary levels. What has lagged behind is the commensurate capacity to regulate them especially in the big urban centres. The Lagos State Government embarked on the massive closure of unregistered private schools some years ago. But removing the unregistered ones from the system is only the tip of the iceberg. Government regulators in most sectors of the economy from road traffic to hotels are mostly besotted with registration of industry players because of the concomitant revenue accruable. Not much attention is paid to maintenance of standards and the devising of objective templates to ensure that the players are playing according to the rules. Public sector regulators just take their licence fees and wait for when it expires for renewal. The public which patronises the services at any level is left to bear the brunt of operators who then become lords of the manor of poorly regulated sectors.

In private school proprietorship, the situation is almost dystopian and heavily tilted against the parents/guardians who have little choice on the matter. The journey to slavery begins after your child or ward gets admitted to any private school. You are given the prospectus and fees to be paid. Not only are the school fees taken as given no matter how exorbitant, you are obliged to pay a myriad of other fees and levies. These include development levies for capital projects in the schools in which you are not a shareholder or investor. Where lies the moral justification in forcing parents  to participate in the development of physical structures when they don’t share in the profits of the school enterprise? These PTA and development levies are presumably arrived at in conjunction with the Parents /Teachers Associations but in most instances, the difference between the PTA executive committee and the school management is like that between six and half a dozen.

Again, you are given the cost of books which you must pay for to the school. It doesn’t matter if you have half of the books on the list at home handed down by an elder child. It doesn’t matter that you own a bookshop stocking the books. I guess even the authors/publishers will still be compelled by their children’s schools to pay for their books to the schools. This insistence on bulk procurement is not out of love for the pupils as the school price list which is always hoarded often comes with a mark-up. Apart from the pecuniary incentive to school authorities, why would a nation with such poor statistics in literacy support a policy that dispenses with used books every session?

In our days, you were certain about the major textbooks for each subject. Identified by their authors, it was Channon and Smith for Mathematics; Nelkon or Abbot for Physics; Oboli or Goh Che Leon for Regional or Physical Geography and Holderness and Lambert for Chemistry. These books and their counterparts in the other subjects were used from Class Three until you finished your O’Levels. Their print quality was such that your juniors inherited them after you left secondary school. Today, in a nation as poor as Nigeria, textbooks are changed every session with a motley collection of authors/publishers such that the lifespan of each book even in the senior classes is one session. While the authors/publishers of old were foreigners and the attendant capital flight was not good enough, must indigenisation translate to exploitation whereby revised editions are released every other year? What gives a school the mandate to procure textbooks compulsorily for pupils? The present crop of directors in Ministries of Education and SUBEBs nationwide went to school on the old scenario recounted above yet they superintend its sabotage for selfish reasons. It is the peculiar tragedy of the African not to seek to leave a situation better than he found it or ensure coming generations are not more deprived than his own generation.

Very young children are being over-stressed with all kinds of extra and elongated academic activities, from the weekday extra lesson to the holiday extension classes. Parents are complicit in these matters as they figure that these help them in managing what would have been time spent at home by the children. But early childhood development experts have empirically established that recreation is a legitimate activity for growing children. In a situation where the school authorities are not complaining because of the pecuniary gains and the parents are not complaining because of its time management benefits, who will save these children from being over-worked if not our regulators?

Again, the nation has just had a disastrous  outing at Olympic  Games. The Sports Minister has given a disquisition as usual on what the problem was, comparing the  financial outlay of nations like the United Kingdom to the medals they won. But he didn’t give us the dollars-per-medal quotient of nations such as Jamaica and Kenya.  Analysis of project failures by most public officers are usually targeted at  pumping more money which translates to more contracts and more corruption. But  Innocent Egbunike, who was the coach of the Olympics team, is a product of school sports. He could blossom in the school system of the 1980s because he attended a public school with large sports pitches and tracks. In today’s world, he could have attended a private school and never discovered his talent because most private schools are squeezed into residential lots without enough space for recreation. Many private schools are converted apartment buildings where children are boxed in with hardly enough space for morning assembly. In this  instance, our physical planners, not the school proprietors, are to blame. They have been arrested in the mental frame of our former colonial masters where land budgets for education were mainly for government use. In our city cadastral maps, there is no conscious effort to democratise educational land use and integrate such in residential layouts. Private proprietors are therefore left with no option but to source for school sites from the open market like commercial developers. Genuine private educationists should be allocated school land at source for private schooling has become a permanent feature of our educational system.

By criticising the poor regulatory environment of private schools, one is not merely advocating a price control of school fees. The matter goes beyond the economic. It touches on the safety of the pupils, carrying capacity, welfare of teachers, sports and academic standards. For now, many school proprietors see every ancillary service to the core one of teaching as avenue to line their pockets. School bus services, procurement of textbooks and school uniforms, holiday lessons, excursions and end-of-year parties all come under this venal blanket. We should not wait until a major tragedy happens with a school bus to realise these matters call for the setting and enforcement of minimum standards by a proactive regulator. Nor should we wait until a school teacher runs berserk and takes it out on a proprietor or the pupils to realise that most of them work under slavish conditions. Source: Punch