A lecturer in the Department of Curriculum Studies and Instructional Technology, Faculty of Education at the Ignatius Ajuru University of Education (IAUE), Rumuolumeni, Port Harcourt, Mr. Henry Vincent Peterside has stated that community education remains strategy for skills acquisition and job creation.
Peterside made the declaration while speaking with The Tide, recently in Port Harcourt during an interview on the need to support community education.
He stressed that education which is generally acknowledged, if supported financially and otherwise stands as a vitial tool for individual and societal emancipation, noting that it is a dynamic process that changes with the needs and aspirations of the society.
According to him, education is an integrative view of learning and development which emphasises the connections and relationships between thinking, feeling and actions, rather than separating cognitive dimensions of education which recognises the integration of community members in effort to bring about desirable social change.
“This education is for people’s empowerment through the involvement of members of the community. It promotes creativity, hence, stipulated that creativity thrives when the environment allows people of all lifestyles, cultures and ethnicities to interact”.
He further explained that community education therefore is not a new phenomenon as rightly observed by stakeholders, noting that it is a non-formal type of adult education which is one of its programmes unlike some other pgorammes of adult education, such as, distance education, extension education, retirement education, women education, literacy education and worker education among others.
Peterside observed that in Nigeria, Community Education had been in practice as indigenous community education before the advent of the early missionaries and the colonial administration, adding that traditional apprenticeship programmes were most eminent forms of community education.
Some of these programmes, he maintained were in the areas of health, agriculture, arts and crafts, saying that the need for improved sanitation in the areas of water supply, proper hygiene and housing, improved infant and maternal welfare was emphasised in the area of health.

Bethel Sam Toby