Lecturer Advocates Structural Reforms In Education Sector

Federal and state governments have been advised to address the fundamental problems facing education in the country for optimal benefits.

Head, Department of Public Administration, Abia State Polytechnic, Aba, Mr. Tobias Amara made this known in an interview with newsmen in Aba recently.

He said that education could attain optimum capacity, if the structures were appropriately positioned.

Amara said the decadence being experienced in the sector was as a result of governments’ long negligence of its responsibilities.

He said that government approach to the implementation of education policies had gone a long way to reduce teachers’ powers of control and sanction on the children.

Amara said the teachers were no longer accorded the due respect and that had forced them to withdraw to their shells, pointing out that the situation had further affected the education sector negatively.

He observed that the poor remuneration of the public school teachers, proliferation of private school, among others were also the contributors to the decline of education standard in the country.

“Today, the capitalist have taken advantage of the situation to destroy the public school sub-sector. It is not compulsory that somebody must be a professor before he or she can teach, but the teacher must know what he is to teach.

“In those days, the best brains were retained in the classrooms, but due to the poor remuneration, the best brains have taken flight to the organised private sector.

“Miracle centres are the offshoot of private schools that are proliferating at a geometric progression and this has killed the spirit of hard work,” he said.

Reacting to the recent criticism trailing the post university matriculation examinations, Amara said that those criticising the exercise were those in the private schools and those who were not in the system.

“The essence of the exercise is to reduce the entrance of block heads into our higher institutions of learning. If you are talking of the implementation, it is a different ball game,” he said.