I have heard and read

about the appalling fall in the standard of education, but I never knew the standard has degenerated to such a ridiculously lamentable level so as not to be able to make a meaning out of a letter written by a  third year Law student, a barrister in making.

It all sounds like a huge joke, too surreal to believe. But in truth, that was the real story that took place last week when a lady, supposedly in her late twenties, walked into my office and gave me a piece that looked like a ‘letter to the editor’, for publication.

In an emotion laden voice, she almost threw herself on my feet as if her life depended on the publication of that piece. But behold what she brandished as a publishable “letter to the editor” was at great variance with her level of education and  course of study.

If I had known how to speak French, German or Latin, I would have attempted to find out from her if Law these days in our universities is taught in any of these languages. For what I read in her so-called “letter to the editor,” could not have been written in English language, or at best a perversion of it.

To my astonishment and utter disbelief, every question thrown at her was met with incoherent, jaundiced English, while all effort to get meaning out of her letter was like squeezing water out of the rock of Gibraltar. I have no doubt that my unlettered grandmother in the village would do better than her in any examination.

With this sad example, we need not to greeth our  teeth in disappointment over this year’s dismal results in WAEC in which only 30 per cent of the candidates secured five credits. That is the metaphor of what we call formal education in Nigeria.

The signs of collapse run the whole gamut. From the primary to the tertiary level, all indices show that public education is comatose. It is, to be candid, a miserable shadow of its past, such that many university graduates today are not better than standard six holders of the past decades. The fraction of sound ones among our graduates is in a lamentable minority.

There are loud complaints from employers about the quality of contemporary graduates our tertiary institutions churn out. Already, some foreign universities have begun to discriminate against our degrees in their post graduate programmes. The situation is that bad.

Today, the implications for sustaining existing levels of skills, let alone improving upon them, are too frightening to contemplate. The sad irony however, is that, it is the nation, not just the youngsters, that is imperfectly educated.

Education, they say, is the bedrock of a nation, without which national development is a ruse. And that is probably why successive governments profess soft spot for education. It is usually accorded priority in budgetary allocations at both federal and state levels. The nation’s thirst for education could be gleaned from overgrowing, almost mind-boggling number of schools, post primary and post secondary schools in the country. These are, by any standard, great leaps.

But how come do we talk of the falling standard of education? How come we have graduates who cannot construct simple but correct sentences in English language?

Many have argued that the handsome investments in Nigerian education have not yielded the desired results because of a surfeit of inconsistent education policies. In other words, the policy of rapid education has not kept pace with the policy of funding education. May be. But the last few years have seen consistent education policies with a handsome investment in the sector. Most state governments have also kept pace with the new trend. Why then is still the rot in Nigerian education?

I think it is self-defeatist to hold government solely responsible for this deterioration. Other stakeholders are culpable too. It is true that the decrepit teaching and research facilities have been severally outpaced by population, and basic conveniences fallen apart. But could this have been responsible for the inability of a university student to express herself orally and in written form? The answer is definitely nay. I think something is wrong with our education system. Something is amiss with our teachers and university lecturers.

In spite of its limitations, one is tempted to agree with Professor Wole Soyinka’s suggestion more than a decade ago, that the solution to our educational problem may continue to elude us until we close down our universities for a whole calendar year, to enable us re-fashion our education system.

At a time like this, when talks about national development dominate the national climate, one is bound to ask: how would national development take place in a situation of genuine fears of receding frontiers of knowledge?

What the gamut of this decadence implies is that, a major objective of our independence, which is the fight against illiteracy, has been betrayed. Where, how and at which point have things gone messy for our education is still a million dollar question that requires a collective soul-searching.

Boye Salau