By Marlikberry,

CLEMENT IDOKO on the neglect of basic education, curriculum review and funding of the sector, among other issues. Excerpts:
Free education was introduced in Nigeria in 1955, 66 years after, how far have we gone?
Let me start by correcting this notion. I’m not aware anytime that we actually have what I describe as absolute free education. When you say something is free, we need to start dissecting what is actually free in our free education. Most of what we call free education happens only in the area of tuition fees. We have not been having what I will describe as holistic free education, whereby a child just goes to the school, receives education, including the materials and stipend. In costing education, we have what is called social cost and private cost. When we put this together, that child they say is enjoying free education won’t pay for his feeding, transport, and books. For now, who pays for all that, is it government or the parents? Education has not been totally free. The parents are still incurring some costs in the education.

But we need to understand what basic education is. It is like a housing project, you see a building standing and all of a sudden, that building collapses. The next thing you need to find out is the three layers of building project: the foundation, block setting and finishing. We take education to be like a housing project, we have primary, secondary and tertiary. Basic education is standing like the foundation, secondary is like block setting and the finishing is the tertiary education.

Today, people are crying about the products of tertiary education because they are seeing those ones. But the foundation is faulty.